Harry Potter and the Song of Night
by QuizzicalSphinx
Summary: In Harry's sixth year at Hogwarts, the beautiful banshee Evensong is the new DaDA professor. But is Snape her partner-in-crime, or her victim? **Now Complete! Sequel Murder Amongst Marauders is up!**
1. Evensong

ONE

"Cyril Wattsworth . . . Hufflepuff!"

Under the applause from the Hufflepuff table, Ron leaned toward Harry and whispered, "Awful lot of first years going to Hufflepuff, aren't there?"

"I don't think so. I mean, we had a lot of Gryffindors last time round." All of them, unfortunately, seemed to be Weasleys: lined farther up the table Harry could see Ron's sister Ginny and the twins Fred and George (with their heads suspiciously close together; Harry wondered fate lay in store for the unsuspecting first years later tonight). Lacking at the table was Percy Weasley, which didn't really count: Percy was now interning as an assistant teacher under Professor McGonagall, which distressed Ron so that over summer holiday he had sent Harry several urgent owls bemoaning his fate ("He's unlivable!" the letters ran. "Now all my aunts and uncles are looking at me with that greedy look in their eyes. I don't know what I'll be doing after graduating, Harry, but I won't be teaching at Hogwarts, believe you me!"). 

The final first year student--"Slytherin!"--safely sorted and seated, Albus Dumbledore rose to give one final speech before dinner began.

"To our first years, I welcome you to Hogwarts. As always, I should like to remind you all that the Forbidden Forest has, in the past year, devoured eight-and-a-half of our graduating students, as well as several underclassmen, and is strictly off-limits. Hence the name Forbidden Forest. Believe me, if it were completely safe we would have long ago changed the name to the Come-And-Go-As-You-Damned-Well-Please Forest. Also, I would like to announce the top floor of the main building is closed until we can get rid of all those giant vampire bats."

"Twenty quid says we three'll have to go into it for some reason before the year's up," said Hermione. Harry laughed, then quickly put a hand over his mouth as Dumbledore continued.

"And finally, I am happy to introduce to you our new Professor of the Defense Against the Dark Arts, Professor Yvaine Evensong."

The feast hall broke into polite applause. Out of the corner of his eye, Harry spotted the Weasley twins conferring, then shaking hands. For the past five years they had set themselves up as Hogwarts's freelance punters. Harry had no doubts they were taking bets as to how long this new teacher would last.

Ron seemed to share the feeling. "Remember the one last year? He died in three days. I bet Hogwarts must have outrageous insurance premiums."

"Oh, hush up, Ron," said Hermione. "Anyway, they never found the body."

At the teachers' table, a slender figure draped in midnight blue robes trimmed with white Irish knotwork, stood and cleared her throat--although it didn't much sound like throat-clearing, unless one could imagine a hummingbird with a touch of laryngitis. A murmur of excitement swept up and down the hall. If she was the new teacher she couldn't be much more than twenty. Her moon-pale braid fell down past her waist, and even from here Harry could see her clear, lovely grey eyes. A collective sigh rose from the male populous, Ron included.

"Thank you, Headmaster Dumbledore." She turned her head and beamed on the four houses. She had a beautiful, sonorous voice that seemed a little too large for her body. "And thank you all, students. I 'm certain I'll enjoy my time here at Hogwarts, and I look forward to teaching you this year and in the many years to come."

"Not bloody likely," murmured Ron as Professor Evensong took her seat again.

Dumbledore clapped his hands, and the empty platters lining the tables suddenly steamed with food. At each students place a candelabrum flared, and at the far end of the Ravenclaw table there was a brief consternation as Agnes Longbottom's right sleeve caught fire. Neville rushed across the room to put her out, and the rest of them loaded their plates.

"I always forget how good Hogwarts food tastes after a summer with the Dursleys," said Harry. Rapidly he took double helpings of buttered corn, boiled spuds, bread pudding, and a huge turkey leg. Hermione, ever scrupulous, gave a plate of broccoli an unsubtle nudge in his direction.

With his mouth full, Ron shouted, "You don't mean your cousin's still on that diet, do you?"

"Worse. Aunt Petunia got so fed up with getting reports from his school that she enrolled him in a special summer camp for fat kids. He's lost sixty pounds."

"No joke? So Dudley's thin now?"

"Not really, but definitely thinner. It's just that now that I'm allowed to eat with the family instead of just getting scraps I've found out Aunt Petunia is a horrid cook." With a sigh of pure contentment, he tore a bite off his turkey leg.

Hermione was picking daintily at her food. Sometimes her precision could nearly kill you. Not only did she have the required two servings of greens, the proper number of carbohydrates, and a glass of milk rather than apple cider, all her portions were laid out in neat circles around her plate. Instead of tucking in, the way Harry and Ron were doing, she was watching the head table with her head cocked that peculiar way of hers. Harry, who in six years had had more classes with Hermione than he cared to count, knew that look as the one Hermione bestowed upon final examinations before ripping them to shreds and passing with full marks.

"The new professor looks a little unusual, don't you think so, Harry?" she asked.

"Unusually _gorgeous_," Ron replied before Harry could respond. Ron stuffed a whole dinner roll into his mouth, chewed and swallowed before going on. "I mean, she's absolutely drop-dead. She looks young enough to be _going_ here, not teaching here."

Hermione gave Harry a pointed look, ignoring Ron.

"Well, yes," Harry said. "I did notice how all the boys dropped everything and gawked for a moment. Do you think she might be a veela?"

Two years ago they'd had quite enough trouble with veelas at the World Quidditch Cup, not to mention Fleur Delacour, who'd only been a quarter veela.

"No, but I did notice her when the teachers were filing in. She's got very pointed ears. I think she's some sort of a faerie."

Harry turned to the headmaster's table for a second, closer look. The new professor was laughing as she talked animatedly with Professor Hagrid (it still seemed odd referring to Hagrid as Professor), and gesturing wildly with her hands. As she reached the climax of her story the entire teachers' table erupted into laughter, with Hagrid thumping the table

hard enough to rattle silverware on Professor Snape's end, and Professor Evensong casually brushed a stray lock of pale hair from her face, revealing a long, tapered ear.

"Yes, I see it. That's odd. I didn't think faeries had much to do with Hogwarts."

"She must be here on some sort of teacher's exchange programme with Bride's Academy of Glamourie in Ireland. I do hope she is. I'd love to learn more about glamourie and faerie lore. Hogwarts has been so neglectful with their liberal arts curriculum." Hermione put a forkful of asparagus into her mouth and sighed, lost, no doubt, in fantasies of extra-credit excursions to Stonehenge. 

"Whatever she is, she's hot." 'Hot' was Ron's new vocabulary word, gleaned from his summer's obsession with muggle film magazines. In addition to talk of Percy's internship, Ron's recent letters were filled with exclamation points in connection with an American pop star named Britney Spears.

Harry's summer had been an unusually good one. As soon as Dudley left for the summer the Dursleys seem to have lost all interest in tormenting Harry, and Uncle Vernon had been generous in his willingness to allow Harry free time. Actually, generous and willing weren't quite the words; Uncle Vernon had picked up Harry under one arm, the Firebolt, Hedwig, and all Harry's schoolbooks under the other arm, and thrown the lot out the door saying "I don't care what you do, just do it _outside!_" Harry spent most of the summer in the far field of an abandoned farmhouse, practicing Seeking with his Firebolt and an enchanted Hi-Bounce ball, which hovered obligingly in place while Harry swooped down on it at all angles. He'd even been invited out rollerblading with some muggle boys in his neighbourhood, and was still waiting for the scabs to fall off. All of them thought it was 'wicked cool' that Harry's aunt and uncle let him keep an owl as a pet, and Hedwig was always willing to play dead for a scrap of hamburger bun so long as her audience wanted to see her perform. As far as Harry was concerned, any relatively Dursley-free summer was a good one.

When the last drop of pumpkin juice had been coaxed from the pitcher, the last plate scraped and shoved back with a groan of contentment, and the last Longbottom extinguished, the prefects rose to lead the little first years up to their houses. The senior students followed up the occasionally shifting staircases to Gryffindor House. Harry, Ron, and Hermione separated only as Hermione made the turn toward the girls' dormitory.

"We'll find out about her tomorrow," Hermione assured.

Harry looked puzzled. Ron only groaned, "For Pete's sake, you're not still going on about that new teacher, are you? She's Dark Arts, Hermione; she won't see the week out!"

"I just think it's interesting," said Hermione, and gave Harry one of her hard looks. "Don't you, Harry?"

"Why should I think it's interesting? Ron's right. Do the math. Six years, six Defense Against the Dark Arts teachers. If she doesn't get blown up, kicked out, arrested, or eaten, she'll run like mad in a month."

"I just think it's interesting that Hogwarts hasn't had a woman teaching the Dark Arts class in a hundred and sixty years. That's all. Good night." She vanished behind a tapestry.

While Ron changed in pyjamas behind the screen, Harry opened the window and set Hedwig free for her night's hunting. After a bumpy ride in the baggage compartment of the Hogwarts Express, she was eager to be off, but she politely made her contented _krrlkl_ noise and paused long enough to be petted before hopping out the window. She sailed off, a chalk-white speck against the darkness of the Forbidden Forest. From somewhere close by a prefect was issuing orders to any first-year still away that tomorrow was a full day of classes and no one, not even a first year, would be excused from tardy demerits. Harry couldn't help but grin. Not too long ago he was a first year, and those days of waking up in the middle of the night, bursting with excitement at the simple prospect of being at Hogwarts, were sometimes very near.

Ron tumbled into bed and immediately pulled the quilt over his face. "Turn off the light, Harry. I'm worn out already. And close the window. It's freezing."

Covering the lantern with its tin hood, Harry shut the window down to a crack so that Hedwig could nose her way, or rather beak her way, back in, Harry lay down on his bed. "We're in trouble, you know that, don't you?"

"Why are we in trouble?"

Harry turned on his back and stared at the ceiling. "Because every time Hermione thinks something's 'interesting' we're always in trouble."


	2. A Fly on the Wall

TWO

"You're not going to _believe_ it, Harry, it's so fantastic, she just stood right up and told the whole class everything and I was perfectly right all along, I knew I was--"

"You're always perfectly right. Even when you're wrong about something you end up being right. What are you right about _this_ time?"

At the flat tone of his voice Hermione seemed to deflate. "You've just gotten out of Potions, haven't you?"

"Yes. I don't see how Snape keeps that job from year to year. Think of all the countless generations of would-be potionmasters who've been turned off the whole business by that man. I wish they'd just go on and let _him_ teach the Dark Arts class."

"Yeah, that'd be perfect," said Ron. "Either he'd be the best professor they've ever had or he'd get killed. It's a win either way!" 

"Keep Snape in your mind, boys, because he's in on it, too," Hermione warned. "Anyway, do you remember how I told you that Professor Evensong is a banshee?"

"I don't know, Ron, do we?"

"Hmm. Let's think. You told me once at the lunch table the day she told the class, then Harry and I both heard it from Professor Evensong when we were in class later that same day, then you told us both together in the common room before we went to bed. No, Hermione, that little piece of information must have slipped my mind. Sorry."

Hermione drew her books to her chest. "Well, then I suppose that anything about Snape is too lowly to be of any interest. Whereas this--" Hermione made a sudden snatch at Ron. From between the pages of his Herbology book she whipped a glossy magazine. "Ooh, what's this? Young Miss? I believe I missed this issue."

"Give it back!" Ron made a wild grab for the mag, seeming to forget that Hermione had sprouted up several inches in the summer. Easily she dangled it above his reach, then, hunching her shoulder over it, flipped through the pages.

"What's this, Ron? 'Hot Summer Fashions'? 'Fifteen Tricks to Drive Him Crazy'? What, having trouble blending your foundation to that perfect line-free finish?"

"Give it back, I'm only holding it for Ginny! Come on, Hermione, I only get it for the articles!"

Less than two months into the new year and already his friends were being more

antagonistic than usual. Harry rolled his eyes. "_Levitium periodical_!" 

_Young Miss _flew from Hermione's fingers. Ron hastily stuffed it back into his book, but not before Harry got a glimpse of a smiling Britney Spears gracing the cover.

Hermione wiped her hands in mock disgust on her robe. "Good heavens, Ron, you didn't have to go and get the pages all sticky . . . ."

"I never did!"

Ron's face had gone nearly as bright as his hair. Sensing another blow-up, Harry stepped in. "What's Snape got to do with Professor Evensong?"

"Well, I've been talking to Professor Evensong a lot after class--and she _is_ from Bride's Academy, I found out--and today she invited me to come to her office during the planning period so that we could discuss yesterday's lecture on Dangerous Beasts of the Irish Moors for an extra credit paper I'm writing in Hagrid's Magical Beasts class--"

"Wait a minute. Hagrid never gives extra credit assignments."

"I know. It's really for a doctoral thesis I'm working on in my spare time, 'The Threat of Muggle Encroachment to the Habitats of Obscure Beasts of the Highlands'. I've so wanted to get some real first-hand information . . . ."

"You're working on your _doctoral thesis_?" Ron looking incredulous. "You're only a sixth year."

"One can never plan too far ahead, Ron."

"Hermione." Ron laid his hand on her shoulder in a consoling way. "I never meant to tell you this flat-out, but I'm sure it's best coming from a friend. You're a total geek."

"You were in Professor Evensong's office . . . _and_ . . . ." Harry made a go-on motion toward Hermione.

"And just as we were discussing the Fachan, which is this positively amazing creature from the West Highlands, it's got one leg and one eye and a huge club and it sort of hops around looking for lost travelers to bludgeon--"

"Hermione . . . ."

"I'm getting there, Harry, I'm getting there! So there we were, having this fabulous

conversation, and suddenly there comes a knock at the door and before we either of us could say anything more the door opened and in . . . walked . . . Professor . . . Snape!"

Hermione was all but dancing at this climax. Ron and Harry only looked confused.

"Did I miss something?" said Harry.

"Had he come to tell her to clear the hell out of his office?" asked Ron.

"No, nothing like that." Hermione gathered them both in for a confidential whisper. "He was holding a _bouquet_."

Both boys staggered away in horror. Ron opened his Herbology book and pretended to vomit in it.

"No, no, no!" Harry shouted, arms crossed round his middle as if warding her off. "Hermione, don't even joke with things like that!"

"It's not a joke. Do let me go on. Anyway, Snape came in wearing his dress robes and everything, even with his hair tied back in a little ribbon-bow."

By now Ron was rolling in the passage floor, simultaneously howling with laughter and making retching noises. His notes for class fluttered off down the corridor. Harry was grinning so hard his cheek muscles hurt. "Hermione, you're not serious."

"I'm quite serious. He stepped into her office and said something like, 'Sorry I'm late, Yvaine'--Yvaine is Professor Evensong's first name--and then he saw me sitting there and he froze all over. His face went even whiter than normal. Professor Evensong said, 'No need to worry, Severus, I'm just finishing up with a student,' and then she apologized to me, saying would I like to continue our discussion same time Monday as she'd been so engrossed that she'd forgotten she had _prior engagements_!"

"No joking? She referred to Snape as a prior engagement?"

"Yes! And they're apparently on first-name terms with each other, too, so it's obvious it wasn't just two professors meeting to discuss school matters."

"Please," begged Ron, "tell me they weren't roses. Tell me he brought her wolfsbane or something."

"A dozen roses. Red ones."

"Oh . . . God!" Ron managed to stumble to his feet, gathering spilled books and fistfuls of papers as he went. "Oh, that's disgusting. That's the most disgusting thing I've ever heard."

"What happened next, Hermione?"

"I said good afternoon to Professor Snape, and he gave me a cold sort of nod. I swear, I don't know why those roses didn't wither. Then, I gathered my books, calmly as I could, and I walked past him out the door. And then I all but bolted down the passage to find you two so I could tell you all about it." 

"This is incredible," Ron said. "I can't believe I got some good gossip before Fred and George. I'm going to have to tell them at dinner."

Hermione's face suddenly snapped tight, like a dresser drawer closed with a bang. She grabbed Ron's arm, causing him to drop his books all over again, and thrust her sharp face into his freckled one.

"Don't you dare tell anyone," she hissed. "Don't be such a beast, you'll spoil things for them."

Harry nodded, remembering. "Yeah, Ron. Ever since the Lord Nettlesby affair any kind of romantic relationships between Hogwarts professors is punishable by dismissal of both parties." Hermione stared at Harry. He shrugged. "You're not the only one who's read _Hogwarts: A History_."

"That's even better," said Ron eagerly. "We could finally get rid of Snape once and for all."

"No." Harry and Hermione spoke together.

"Why not?"

"Because," said Harry. "It's all right if you want to ruin Snape's career, but I draw

the line on mucking about with the man's love life."

"Besides, it mightn't have been love." Hermione had that thoughtful look of teacher-worship about her again, the one Harry remembered from Professor Lockhart's brief stint as Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher. "Maybe he was just bringing her a specimen. You know. Strictly professional."

"A specimen? Hermione, you're really reaching for answers on this one."

"I know, Harry. It's just . . . well, I really like Professor Evensong. And--oh, hell, I dunno. She just seems so not-his-type. She's young, beautiful, friendly, sensitive . . . ."

"Sane," said Harry.

"Breathing," added Ron.

" . . . And we all know what a toad _he _is. I wish I could warn her. Oh, well." From inside her cape she fetched up her reading glasses. "I'm off to the library. Professor Evensong gave me some really excellent sources. Would you two like to join me?"

"No thank you," said Ron. "My mind is still reeling from the shock."

Hermione trotted off toward the library. Ron and Harry turned to the corner toward the common room.

"Seabiscuit," said Harry to the Fat Lady's portrait. The portal obliged, and the boys settled down by the chess board. On a rainy day like this one the commons was packed, and the chess board was the best way to get some privacy.

"This is just creepy," said Harry, careful to keep quiet around the first years. "Snape and Evensong."

"Walking about in the rain. Holding hands." Ron leaned forward as if with the most telling fact of all and hissed, "She called him _Severus_." 

"I know. I can see it all in my mind. Holding hands, and her in rubber gloves to keep from picking up Snape's thin layer of slime."

Ron laughed, quietly, so as to keep from attracting attention. He settled back in his chair. "Oh, to be a fly on the wall for _that_ little romantic rendezvous."

A cog turned in Harry's brain. He smiled for a moment as a plan swelled, unbidden, to full flower, then shook his head to dismiss it.

But Ron had already seen that look. "Come on, Potter, I know that fiendish gleam in your eyes. You've got an idea. Spill it."

"You mentioned something about being a fly on the wall? I just remembered something."

"Remembered what? Oh, Harry, don't leave me in suspense, you're as bad as Hermione, you two are going to kill me! What are you planning?"

A slow smile lit Harry's face, sparkling like the common room fire in his brilliant green eyes. He folded his fingers together and gave Ron a deeply wicked look. "Which one of your very best friends owns an invisibility cloak?"

Ron's eyes widened. "No way. You wouldn't dare. Hermione'd murder you. And if Snape even guessed you had--he'd really _really_ murder you. Slow lingering death, man. Possibly involving boiling oil."

Harry stood up. "I'm getting my cloak."

"No, don't, Harry! Bloody hell, I knew I should have never let you hang around Fred and George; they've corrupted you!"

Harry stepped into the bedchamber. In a flash Ron was on his feet and following, but by the time he made it to Harry's room it was empty. Only a squeak of a sneaker sole on the stone floor and the creak as the door opened caused Ron to wheel about just in time to see the door pulled slowly closed by an invisible hand.

Ron made it to the commons again just as the main door opened gently, as if pushed by a draft of air. Several of the other Gryffindors stared as Ron, seemingly in hot pursuit of nothing at all, dashed across the room. 

"Harry!"

Ron emerged in an empty hallway, the storm drowning all sound as it crashed against the great stained glass windows.

"Harry!" he shouted, in as near the right direction as he could guess. "Don't get caught, okay?"

There was no reply. Ron turned back to the Fat Lady's portrait, still open, when a thought struck him. Cupping his hand around his mouth, he called again down the dark hallway, "At least tell me everything when you get back!"


	3. The Song of Night

THREE

_Now_, thought Harry, _if I were two wizards in love, where would I go on a stormy night?_

The invisibility cloak did wonders for keeping him invisible; it did nothing for keeping out the wet. The fierce storm tapered to a dull drizzle, but Harry had been caught in the thick of it. The cloak was like a damp carpet thrown over his shoulder, making it hard to breathe, and his glasses clouded up several times before he recalled the _opaquetis finis_ spell that had proven so useful to spectacle-wearing wizards since the beginning of spectacle history. Slowly the glasses un-fogged. 

Hagrid passed about two feet away, dressed in brown oilskins, stepping silently out of a bank of fog like a ship at sea. Fang followed. As the dog trotted by he stopped, snorffled in Harry's direction, and gave a happy whine. The dog would have found Harry by scent alone, and no doubt would have begged the boy to play, if Hagrid had given a shrill whistle to send him jogging along again. Mentally Harry wiped his brow and heaved a sigh of relief.

The first stop was Hogsmeade, which seemed the logical choice. Rain ran in the gutters, from the rooftops, and the old-fashioned gaslamps raised a garish yellow haze on Hogmeade's narrow main street. Every time Harry came here by night he nearly expected to see Sherlock Holmes headed one way and Jack the Ripper headed the other. It was just that of street. Only one spot--the Leaky Cauldron--was still open at this hour, filled wall to wall with merrily drunken young leprechauns trying to pick fights with merry and equally drunken young goblins. Hardly the place to take a lady friend. A quick look round proved that they weren't there.

Harry began to feel slightly foolish. Sixteen years old and running around to spy two professors on a date, risking expulsion or murder at the hands of Snape or at least a bad head cold. Foolish and impulsive, risking all that just to show off. He was curious about Evensong and Snape, but more than that, he had wanted to impress Ron by going out and doing something daring and impressively stupid, just to win points in his friend's favour. That wasn't worth getting expelled for, either. And it was Snape, after all, who hardly seemed worth any of the above. Plus the fact--and he felt this more and more--that if Professor Evensong and Snape really were out doing something . . . _intimate_ . . . Harry didn't want to know. The last thing he needed at this point in his life was to start seeing all his professors as human beings.

He checked down all of Hogmeade's main streets, so at least he could tell Ron he'd made the effort, then headed back toward Hogwarts. Water soaked into his sneakers, causing froggy-sounds as he walked.

_Maybe they really are in love_, he thought, walking up the muddy path toward the school. That might actually be nice. That would also put things safely in the realm of being None of His Business. Snape in love would mean a preoccupied Snape, a Snape with other things on his mind than the systematic destruction of the spirit of every student who passed through the doors of Potions class. Unless she broke it off with him, in which case Snape would be more loathsome than ever. 

Without warning a bolt of lightning cracked the clouds and sizzled down, shearing a limb from the old oak that Harry had practically been standing under. He jumped, then ran up the path, just as the rain began pounding down, flecked with bits of sleet that stung even through the thick cloak. One icy ball caught the back of his hand hard enough to draw blood.

He looked around frantically for cover, bouncing on his heels to stay warm. If he'd been on the other side of Hogwarts he could have taken refuge with Hagrid; even as a professor Hagrid probably wouldn't report him to McGonagall. _Probably _being the pertinent word. His only other options were the Forbidden Forest and Professor Sprout's greenhouse. In other words, he had only one option, because be damned if he would go into the Forest again.

Another lightning bolt slammed to earth hard enough to tear up clods of soil, and the sound of it filled his ears and his head and his scar with the whining crack of electricity. He bolted for the greenhouse. Please, let Professor Sprout have forgotten to lock up again.

One hand rubbed his scar, which tingled in the same way a nine-volt battery tingles if you touch it to your tongue: a dry, icy burn. The close brush with lightning had woken it up. Fate was kind, and Professor Sprout was as distracted as usual. As luck would have it, she had cast a weatherproofing spell on the glass roof after last winter's hailstorm; instead of striking the roof, the ice and rain was repelled from it, running in torrents down the walls, and lightning tended to curve to one side. It would be dry and safe, if not warm. Harry scurried in and slammed the door behind him. 

"What was that?" said a voice.

Harry whirled around, startled enough to forget about being invisible. The dark shape of leaves, of trees, the sweet smell of flowers and the dry dusty odor of lavender and thyme overwhelmed his senses in a way he never noticed in class, when there was only miles of fusty plants to label and memorize and remember in Latin. Now the smell was somewhere between a damp cardboard box and a fruity breakfast cereal--not exactly a bad smell, but an overpowering one. He was alone, breathing hard. The cloak was miserably damp and his fingers went to his throat to unfasten it.

Suddenly the dark leaves stirred, and a glimmer of lantern light shone through briefly before branches fell together again and hid it.

"I was certain I heard the door." The tall lean figure of someone who could only be Severus Snape drifted like a black paper cut-out into Harry's range of vision. Snape stepped over some ceramic pots, knocked one over, and cursed. Harry dropped to his knees and fought to keep his breath under control as Snape drew closer. The professor rattled the door handle, then turned the inside lock.

"It was just the storm, love," said a sweet, husky woman's voice. "Come back to me. I'm cold."

_Oh no, oh no_, Harry thought. _Please be discussing school matters_. **Please** _be discussing school matters._

Snape lingered a moment, drawing close enough to the glass door that a flash of lightning lit his thin face from the side. "I see it. It got the oak at the bottom of the path."

"Then come back." Yes, it was quite definitely Professor Evensong: that rich banshee's voice. 

She sounded so small, so beseeching, that Harry wanted to grab Snape by the collars and shake him, demanding he go back to her. The more he thought about, the more it seemed like a good idea, and the more he thought about it being a good idea the more it seemed like the only possible course of action. It was all he could do to hold himself back, telling himself firmly, over and over again, that there were many less painful ways to commit suicide and once he was out of here he could try any one of them he liked--anything but let Snape know he was here. Harry shrank into his small place, wedged between a Japanese forgetfulness tree and a Whomping Willow so young it was barely able to do more than flap a branch at him before yawning and curling back to sleep.

"It's the students," Harry heard Snape say. "You never know what they'll get into around here. You'll learn soon enough: every time you hear something, find out at once what it is. I've had to keep a silence spell on my rat, just to keep from mistaking him from a noise in the passageway."

"Hush. Don't be silly. No child in its right mind would be out on a night like this."

_That's the truth, Professor_, Harry thought, shivering from damp and cold.

"There's always the chance, darling. It wouldn't have to be a student. It could be Filch, or the groundskeeper. Anyone." He sounded odd--nervous, almost hunted. 

After one last, penetrating look over his shoulder, Snape paused, reached into his inside pocket, and produced a cigarette case and a lighter. Acrid smoke cut through the greenhouse smell.

Snape chuckled. "Forgive me for saying so, Yvaine, but I think the best part of this will be telling Dumbledore I'm leaving." 

Harry flinched at Evensong's dark, rolling laughter, which seemed to big for that white, fragile body. Investigative journalism suddenly lost its charms, and all he wanted to do was get out of here undetected and in one piece.

"Are you sure you want to do this now, Severus? I have time. I can wait. Waiting is nothing to me."

"I don't have your time, Yvaine." His voice was sharp, but sad, almost unrecognizable. "I've been here sixty years--I've got a decade over McGonagall, and that's saying something. I can't put it off forever. I want you now, while I'm still young enough for us to have time together."

"Oh." Something in her sigh made Harry want to cry for her. "Oh, my Severus. I forgot. I always forget."

"Don't forget." _That_ tone Harry recognized from class--it was the one Snape tended to save for students like Neville Longbottom.

"Don't be upset." That dark laughter again. "Come here to me, love. Come."

There was thunder, a great persistent boom that shook every pane in the roof. Harry cringed. He would have risked making a run for it then and there, but a new sound crept through and over the storm--a low, musical crooning sound without words. It was . . . it was like the purring of a mother cat. No, it changed again; now it was like a single humming note on a violin. It changed again, twice more, and suddenly Harry knew the song. He had known it all his life, but had forgotten it. It was here again; he never needed to be separated from it any more.

His mother's voice.

_Hushabye . . . don't you cry . . . go to sleep my little baby . . . When you wake . . . you shall have . . . all the pretty little horses . . . ._

Harry cried out, stumbling blindly toward the source of the sound, filled only with a desperate, inarticulate cry: _Mother, Mother! _But his cry was smothered by a deeper groan from the throat of a grown man. Snape. In pain.

Harry shoved aside bushes, pushed over pots recklessly, not caring about the noise. In the mellow light of a lantern Evensong held Snape in her arms. She pushed back his head, lowering her own mouth near his, as if for a kiss, then let it hang open and waiting above him. That weird humming sound went on, merging into music, to words, to the waver of a cello. 

A halo of darkness, like silk under water, slowly drifted from Snape's nostrils and mouth. Evensong made a delighted sound and Harry heard her sharp inhalation as the blackness--whatever it was--flowed out of Snape's and into her. Evensong's white-blonde hair hung loose and floated wildly around them like sea anemones. The humming throbbed in Harry's breastbone, in his head, his scar was throbbing, and it wasn't the lightning anymore. Snape made that horrid low groan again, but Evensong's song rose to drown it out.

Harry collapsed between his potted plants again, sobbing in absolute silence, hunching his shoulders and racking under the force of barely constrained screams. He heard his mother, singing a cradle song she must have sung back then, before she was killed. He wanted her badly, more powerfully than any other time in his life. 

He wanted his mother.

* * *

Thunder boomed again, softer this time. The storm had almost passed over. Against the windows the grey dawn light turned the lawns of Hogwarts to pearl. 

Harry stretched himself. His knees were weak from so long spend in a cramped position. For a moment he thought he was back in the cupboard under the Dursleys's stairs; he remembered how often he woke up there thinking his legs would never uncurl themselves. Then he smelled lavender, saw the light through the ceiling. He remembered where he was, but not why he was there. He knocked over a pot as he stood.

Then he heard a moan. "Oh God . . . my head."

"You fell asleep, Severus. I didn't have the heart to wake you."

"God. It must be five o'clock in the morning. I have class in four hours."

"Will you tell him today?"

"I . . . yes. Yes I will."

He saw them standing, silhouetted by the faint light: Evensong with her hair floating around her knees, Snapes stroking the pale line of her cheek.

"We must go back. I've got class in four hours too, I suppose." She yawned and stretched, prettily, like a cat.

A cat? Last night, before he dozed off, wasn't she purring? And singing at the same time? No, that had been a dream, his mother . . . .

Snape leaned , pressed him lips to Evensong's. Her hands crept up, and the hair on the back of Harry's neck rose as she began to murmur again. Not that sound again, not that singing again. But she was only whispering something: some endearment, or just goodbye. 

It was all the motivation Harry needed: as soon as the two professors were out the door he was up and gone, flying back to Gryffindor like a shot.


	4. At the Back of the Library

FOUR

Harry crawled to bed at five-thirty in the morning and by avoiding breakfast was able to sleep until fifteen till nine. He dragged himself out of bed, stuffing last night's muddy clothes under the bed ruffle so that the boys' dorm housemaid Honorah Flunce (b. 1630-d. 1666) wouldn't find them and bring up the matter with the head housemaid Nancy Reilly (b.1477-d.1505), dressed in his work robes and headed downstairs, late for sixth form Arithmancy. Professor Pontifus gave him a hard look, but since he had not yet called role Harry was able to slide into his seat without comment.

Second period Harry slipped early into the empty classroom, forehead on his desk, and slept for what felt like an hour but was in reality about fifteen minutes before the doors banged open and Professor Trewlaney began demanding homework. A little puddle of drool had formed on his desk in the meanwhile and unfortunately his rather nasty Slytherin seatmate chose to put his elbow in it. Apparently he assumed Harry had done it on purpose. All through the period Harry found himself being pinched on the hip and upper arm until he whispered a countercharm to stop it.

Third period he sought out Hermione.

"What is it, Harry?" She whisked off her reading glasses and tucked them away. "I'm nearly late as it is."

"Ten minutes early is nothing like being nearly late. I want you to tell me everything you know about banshees."

"Can it wait? I've got to get to Defense Against the Dark Arts. I want Professor Evensong to check my thesis statement. Better still, you might ask her between classes. She could tell you anything you wanted to know."

"I don't want to ask her. I don't want to come within twenty feet of her. Can you live without your lunch today?"

"Sure. Harry?" She brushed aside his black bangs and laid her wrist on his temple. "Harry, are you feeling all right? You're very warm."

Professor Evensong drifted by with her graceful, almost noiseless tread, dressed in simple white robes trimmed in blue which brushed against the stone floor with a ghostly whishing. A sweet, cinnamony smell hung around her hair and robes,. For some reason the smell reminded Harry of breakfast. "Good morning, Miss Granger. Good morning to you, Mister Potter."

"Good morning, Professor." Under cover of proximity Hermione nudged Harry into grunting a sound vaguely like 'hullo'.

"Oughten you best be getting to your class, Mister Potter? The bell's in five minutes." She reached out as if to rumple Harry's head--a temptation Hermione had to resist several times a day, as Harry's hair all but begged to be rumpled--then hesitated, smiled, and turned to Hermione. "I'm looking forward to delivering today's lecture, Miss Granger. I'm sure you'll find it interesting."

"I'm sure I will, Professor." 

The two of them stood aside as Professor Evensong swept into class.

Harry's voice was deeper and more urgent than normal. "I'll meet you in the library at during the lunch hour. At our regular study table." 

"Ah," she said brightly. "The darkest, most dubious-looking table in the shadows at the very back wall next to the Grimoires Best Left Unnamed shelf?"

He gave her a pale, grim grin, wiping his face with the back of his hand. "That's the one. Bring your books. And your notes. And anything else you can think of."

"Harry!" But he was walking away. "Harry! What have you got next, Magical Beasts? Skip it and go to the hospital wing. You're white as a sheet."

If he heard her at all, he didn't turn around. Hermione shook her head, donning her reading glasses once more. "Silly boy." And headed into class.

* * *

Harry waited in the library for close on forty minutes before Hermione--puffing under the weight of several large volumes, clutching a sheath of papers between her teeth, and with her player and headphones attached to her belt-made it to the back table. Harry made no move to help her as she wove and swayed across the room with her load. The whole pile fell with a bang on the study table, and Hermione refrained from a scalding remark as soon as she got a close look at his white face and the grey hollows under his eyes.

"I've brought everything, but Harry, I really think you need to see Madam Pomfrey. You're definitely coming over with something."

"Probably," he said, and coughed. "Spent most of last night out in the rain."

"Whatever for?"

He shook his head and, taking the topmost book from the pile, opened it. The page was a selection of fifteen-letter-long words containing no consonants and surrounded by random accent marks. 

"Oh, don't bother. It's in Irish Gaelic." She patted her tape player. "That's what this is. Professor Umlaut of the Foreign Languages Department gave me a recording to help me research my thesis. _Learn Seventeen Magical Tongues At Once in Only Five Days_." She cleared her throat and spoke in a perfect Irish accent. "_Bim ag imirt leadioge_. I often play tennis."

"I hope you've gotten farther than the tennis-playing bits, otherwise you're not going be much help."

"You said you wanted to know about banshees, right? Ahem. 'Banshee' comes from the Irish Gaelic word _bean-sidhe_, meaning 'faerie woman.' The term has been widely if inaccurately ascribed to a type of evil or Unseelie faerie that should be properly referred to as _'baobhan sith,' _a hideous and haglike faerie who delights in tormenting mortals and who is not related to the true banshee. The most common myth is that good or Seelie banshees attach themselves to specific mortal families and sing requiems if a member of their family is about to die; however, thanks to recent scholars we now know that banshees are territorial, and are in reality attached to places and the individuals who reside there, rather than the individuals themselves. And that's as far as I'm going without an explanation."

"Do banshees ever leave their territory?"

Hermione ran her thumb and forefinger across her sealed lips, then pretended to lock them at the corner and throw the key over her shoulder.

"Oh, all right." Harry dug both hands into his hair. "I decided to follow Snape and Evensong last night."

"You what!"

The librarian shhhed at them. Hermione dropped to a fierce whisper.

"You what? Harry, how could you?"

"Look, Hermione. If I've learned anything in the past six years it's that when Snape does anything shady, one of us has to keep an eye on him. It never fails to pay off, and this time it paid off in spades."

"And if I've learned anything in the past six years it's that when Snape has done anything shady it generally ends up saving your life. What is it this time?"

In hushed tones he explained how he'd gone looking for Snape and Evensong in Hogsmeade, turned back in the storm, and gotten shut into the greenhouse with them.

"And then?" Hermione sounded disgusted.

"Then . . . " He pressed his temples, trying to think. All that came back was the sense of something dreadfully wrong. "Then I don't know. I thought . . . all I remember is that my mother was singing."

Hermione glanced away, looking sad and vaguely guilty, as if she were somehow responsible for having both parents when Harry didn't. 

"Harry," she said softly, "are you sure you didn't fall asleep?"

"I did fall asleep, but that was later. It's like there's a big black spot in my head where the memory should be."

__

A big black spot . . . a pool of darkness billowing on the air like black silk under water . . . and his mother's voice.

A shiver of cold enveloped him, as if he had walked into a draft. He pulled his robe tighter around his body. "I was under the Japanese forgetfulness tree. Might that have anything to do with it?"

"They're all dormant now. Their pollen is only potent for a few days in high spring. I can't believe you followed them! Harry, why?"

"I'm damn well glad I did. Something's going on. Snape said he was going to tell Dumbledore today that he was leaving school. What attracts a banshee to a territory, anyway?"

"High concentrations of magical energy. Magically inclined people and families. In fact, the true banshee has the property of replenishing magic in a depleted area, which is why they're so valuable to our magical ecosystem. I found that out researching my thesis."

"Yes, but do they ever leave once they've found a territory?"

"There's a ceremony called a laying which can be used if the banshee is disturbing or troublesome. The Bath and Wells incident is a famous case wherein a banshee attached herself to a particular mudblood bishop who was unaware that he possessed any magical abilities. The bishop concluded he had an evil spirit. She left only after an unsuccessful exorcism convinced her that she was unwanted."

"Would Hogwarts be considered an area of concentrated magical energy?"

"You bet your life it would. An area with all these students and teachers, all those creatures in the Forbidden Forest, herbs and potions and spells going off every minute, why, it's positively crammed--" She broke off without warning. "Harry. I don't like where you're going with this."

"Is it possible Evensong's attached herself to Hogwarts? Or to Snape?"

"If she has, then Snape is the safest now that he's ever been. Banshees don't harm people they've attached to; they try to protect them. They can be fiercely loyal, loyal enough to kill anyone who crosses them. I half-expect that's why Dumbledore hired her on to begin with: extra magic to ward off You-Know-Who now that he's on the prowl again. Harry, you look really bad." 

Harry touched his face, right next to the scar. His brow had broken out in sweat, and his bangs and sideburns were drenched with it.

Hermione reached out and laid her hand on his. "You need to go to the infirmary, Harry."

"I need to go to class. It must be nearly time. No, damn it! I've got Evensong next. I'm not going anywhere near her until I'm certain what she and Snape are up to."

"Oh, come off it, Harry. She's not going to blast you in front of an entire classroom of witnesses. Besides, you wouldn't want to raise any suspicions until you know for sure, right?"

"You're just trying to keep me from missing a class."

"Too right, I am. Schemes and plots come and go, but demerits go on your permanent record."

He gathered up half of Hermione's books while she took up the rest, and they walked quietly among the tall stacks toward the library commons.

"What about this other sort of faerie--bayvan shee?"

"_Baobhan sith_," Hermione corrected. "Oh, they're entirely different. They're--look out!" 

It was as if the books he carried suddenly gained an extra hundred pounds. They tumbled out of his arms, and Harry collapsed on top of them. A nearby Slytherin shrieked. At the other end of the library Professor Bailia heard the clatter and rushed to kneel beside him. She touched his wrist for a pulse, then laid her hand to his face, observing his dead-white clammy skin.

Close to tears, Hermione paced the floor beside him. Students were gathering round from all points of the library. "I told him earlier to go see Pomfrey. He was out in the rain all night. He's probably gotten pneumonia!"

Professor Bailia turned her dark face toward a pair of Ravenclaw boys. "You two. Go to the hospital wing. Fetch a litter and Madam Pomfrey. And run, don't walk."

As the boys burst out of the crowd and made a race for the door, Bailia shook her head at Hermione. "No, my dear. It's not pneumonia. Looks like this lad's been upwind of a very nasty curse."


	5. The Potions Master

FIVE

"Harry? Harry, wake up."

The room was hazy, and a dim outline stood over him, shaking his arm insistently and repeating his name. Harry groped around for his glasses, but a helpful hand presented them before he was fully aware of it. He put them on upside down, took them off, turned them over, and the outline resolved itself into Hermione.

"You know, I've never really looked at your glasses before. You must be terrifically farsighted. Have you ever considered contact lenses?"

Yes, definitely Hermione.

"Are you feeling better?" she asked.

"Much better. Still a little light-headed."

"That's just the _psyche elatorius _spell Dumbledore did. That or the rum. Hagrid slipped it to you in a teacup, insisting it would perk you right up. Neville told me. You've been here four days."

Neville Longbottom did medicinal herbaria research under Pomfrey. It was terrifying to know that someone like Neville might have been supplying him with decoctions while he slept. Harry sat up, feeling the whirling room slowly come to a stop.

"Snape didn't quite quit," Hermione said.

"Really?"

"Dumbledore wouldn't let him quit outright. He's staying on until the end of the term, then he's going to retire. When I asked around nobody seemed to know why he all of a sudden wanted out, so it looks like he and Evensong are still keeping things hush-hush." Her tone subtly altered when she mentioned this. She leaned close to his ear and whispered, "He told Dumbledore he was leaving on the same day you collapsed. Now everybody's certain he's the one who cursed you."

"No whispering!" crowed a familiar gleeful voice. "No whispering, no conspiring, no secrets whatsoever allowed in the hospital wing!"

Hermione shouted, "Bugger off, Peeves! You know you're not allowed in the infirmary. Haven't you ever heard of patient confidentiality?"

Peeves gave her the double-finger and drifted off to torment someone else.

"I was cursed? I thought it was a cold."

"Either you got cursed, or you got in the way of someone being cursed. Neville says that McGonagoll told Pomfrey it was probably the second one. But as nobody else has turned up with a full curse, they don't know what's going on, so they just gave you all the standard treatments. _Psyche elatorius _for the depression and a full _physicum_ for the symptoms. Evensong did a Cleansing for any negative energies that might be hanging about, and you perked right up."

"I'll bet I did," said Harry darkly. "Considering it was her curse to begin with."

Hermione dropped her hands to her hips, sighing in frustration. "I still don't believe she's done anything wrong, Harry, but Snape tried to leave like you said he would, and I'm sure now you caught them in the greenhouse together. Something's up. I just can't decide what. Things just get shadier and shadier."

"Told you," said Harry.

She looked away for a moment, her knobbly ink-blotted fingers twining with his and squeezing hard enough to hurt.

"I was worried about you," she said. "So was Ron." 

Harry waited for her to say something more. Her eyes were shut, and she chewed her lower lip in the same way he'd seen her nibble a quill when she was trying to determine exactly what she wanted to write.

"Which is why," she said at last, and in an entirely different tone, "I've been sent on behalf of all Gryffindor House to bring you this gift basket. We hope you shall be rejoining us soon."

She reached down to the floor, and with a grand flourish dropped a heavy, beribboned basket on Harry's lap. It was full of get-well-quick cards which occasionally surprised Harry by ejecting fountains of iridescent glitter upon being opened, a selection of Honeyduke's sweets, and a Weasley Brothers Unlimited Surreptitious Glowing Wand, Patent Pending, which cast a light only visible to the person wielding it ('perfect for reading after lights-out and all-purpose general prowling,' promised the fastened card). There was also a creamy grey envelope, addressed in purple ink by an instantly recognizable hand, which Harry plucked out at once.

Hermione politely turned her back while Harry opened his godfather's letter.

__

Harry,

I received word of your misfortune. I keep my ear to the ground concerning Hogwarts. Don't get in over your head. I hope the gift I sent will be entertaining--and informative--while you convalesce. 

All my love,

Sirius

"He send me something. This must be it." From the bottom of the basket Harry removed a flat, rectangular package wrapped in brown paper, held shut by a wax star-shaped seal with a dog's head in the center. From the weight and feel he knew at once what it was. "A book."

Hermione leaned forward as Harry broke the seal and unwrapped the papers.

"It's _The Odyssey_," she remarked. "My parents have got that. I read it ages ago. What a pretty bookmark." She stroked the small golden bells which hung between the pages. The bookmark was a burgundy ribbon with stars embossed on its length. "Gryffindor colours, too."

"He said he hoped it would be informative. Think he knows something I don't?"

"No doubt. May I?" Hermione took the book from his hands and opened it to where the bookmark lay. "Yes. This is the bit where Odysseus has to sail past the isle of the sirens, where a hundred ships before his have perished."

"Give it over. Maybe I can read it before I leave."

"Madam Pomfrey says you'll be all right for classes tomorrow. Oh, and I nearly forgot."

Harry was deep into his new book when Hermione dropped a thick load of papers on top of it. "What's all this?" he asked.

"I did all your homework assignments, in between--and I can't stress this strongly enough--researching my thesis, and doing your grubby-work on banshees. You can make it up me later. Oh, and you might better check under the parcel of Fizzing Whizbees." She smiled, showing both dimples. "You can make that that up to me later, as well."

Harry pushed through the cards and candies. Hidden in the corner of the basket was a hard bundle wrapped in a paper napkin on which Hermione had scribbled a note.

_Found this in the greenhouse. Funny. Never took him for a smoker. Thought you might could find a use for it._

Inside was a gold cigarette lighter with a curious, elaborate monogram: two entwined _S_'s.

* * *

Seated next to Ron in Potions the following afternoon, Harry read and reread the book Sirius had sent. It was all in verse and he had to keep flipping to the back to read the text notes, but he thought he finally understood what was going on. He was just on the part where the ship's crew was getting Tranfigured into pigs when Snape walked in, let the doors slam shut behind him with a customary bang, and without pausing marched to his place at the podium.

"I trust," he said, "that you are all prepared for the test."

A hand went up in front. "What test, sir?"

"The one you're about to take. Malfoy. Put on your gloves and use the tongs to pass out the phials here on the table, one for every two pupils. Pupils, take out your mortars and pestles, put on your work gloves and I hope you remembered them because I will not be loaning them out and for the love of God _why_ is someone _giggling?"_

Snape wheeled around, brown cloak flaring, and descended upon a panicked Gryffindor seated very near the podium. 

"Ten points from Gryffindor for Miss Hoeg's unreasonable sense of humour. What is wrong with you?"

Jenni Hoeg was turning from pink to purple. Her cheeks were puffed out, as if she were holding her breath, and her shoulders shook. Tears of laughter stood in her eyes, and as Harry watched one trickled down the side of her face. She was terrified, but valiantly choking back her laughing. By now even Draco Malfoy had paused in his work. 

Snape clutched the corners of her desk and leaned over her. Any closer and his nose would have touched her forehead.

"I'm listening," he said with deadly calm. "What's . . . so . . . funny."

Jenni shook her head. She swallowed hard, seeming to cure her fit of giggling, but when she spoke it came out croaking, as if she were still trying to hold her breath and speak at the same time. "Nothing at all, sir."

"Twenty more points from Gryffindor, and unless whatever-it-is is humourous enough to make _me_ laugh I suggest you keep any future jokes to yourself, Miss Hoeg." 

Just as fast as he dropped upon her he spun away and stalked across the platform. Jenni gave a huge, spluttering exhalation, inhaled just as deeply, then melted into her pew, red-faced but breathing normally.

"Why am I not seeing mortars on desks and prepared students, hmm?" Snape snapped his fingers at Malfoy, who came back to life with a jolt, distributing materials to the last few pairs of lacking students. There was a general fumbling for pestles.

"What you have before you is a phial of distilled liquid from the root of the Siberian stramonium plant. It is highly concentrated, so the small amount you have should be enough for each of you. It is related to the rubber-tree plant and clings like glue to whatever it touches, making it doubly difficult to handle. I suggest you do not touch it with your bare hands, ingest it, or breathe in the fumes. I would also suggest you _not shake the phial_, Mister Weasley."

Ron, who had been turning their shared phial back and forth, immediately put it down.

Snape prowled the platform, hands clasped behind his back, casting the occasional glower on Jenni Hoeg as if daring her to contradict him. Jenni seemed to have lost whatever sense of humour she possessed and was meekly taking notes. Not for the first time, Harry noticed the worn grey grooves in the wooden platform where Snape's boots must have trod the same path a thousand times or better. One day the whole thing would collapse, professor and all.

"You will have also noted that the specimen I have given you is extremely cold. It is, in fact, approximately forty degrees below zero in a room temperature environment. Under proper circumstances, such as its natural habitat in northern Siberia, it can be even colder, close to three hundred degrees below. The liquid in those phials is not merely bubbling. It's boiling. But with the proper additions, it can be reduced to a dry, cool, sandlike powder called scalesafe, useful for treating severe burns and regrowing new skin over scar tissue. 

"Your test today will use the information gleaned from your notes to reduce your sample to its powder form. Begin."

Snape sat down and crossed his legs as students began filing toward the herb closet for components. Harry touched the small lump the lighter made in his sleeve, watching Snape all the while. The man's face seemed to be less deadpan, more thoughtful than normal. Harry considered dropping the lighter into the Lost Articles box at the head office, but dismissed the idea. If there would ever be a for a man-to-man talk with him, it was now, while time and evidence was on Harry's side.

The test went well, with only one pair of students completely failing to turn their liquid stramonium to powder and a single person being sent to the hospital wing with frostbitten fingers. The thirty points lost by Gryffindor was reduced to ten as Robert MacGowen and his Gryffindor seatmate received credit for finishing the test first. Harry waited until nearly everyone had gone, then shooed Ron out.

"What is it, Harry?"

"Student-teacher conference. I'll catch up with you in Dark Arts." Harry bundled Ron out the door.

Drawing a deep breath for courage, Harry headed down the center aisle. His steps rang very loud on the shallow wooden stairs, and the acoustics of the lecture hall, perfect for amplifying Snape's sharp voice, threw echoes off the walls. Snape stood at the main table, stuffing the day's notes into his dark brown horsehide bag. He paused and looked up, following Harry with his eyes, and spoke not a word until Harry was less than a yard from him. From this distance Harry knew what Jenni Hoeg had been holding her breath against, and what had made her laugh. The strong odor of oil of cinnamon was all over Snape, incompatible with his smoldering demeanour.

"Is there a problem, Mister Potter?"

Without a word Harry reached into his sleeve pocket, extracted the lighter, and tossed on the corner of the table. The single clack it made was very loud indeed. He matched eyes with Snape and stood, waiting.

Snape's mouth twitched, which with him could mean dismay or amusement. His face was unreadable, but by the torchlight his eyes held a dark, cold glitter. He picked up the lighter, turned it over in his hands before muttering something. The lighter vanished--no doubt Apparating to a more secure spot.

"May I ask where you found this, Potter?"

"In the greenhouse. Where you dropped it."

Their eyes locked. Harry didn't even dare to blink. He felt strong and very cold inside, too cold to be affected by anything Snape could say or do to him. For the first time since they had met, Snape was finally against a wall.

"Thank you," said Snape, "for returning my property. Now if you will excuse me, Potter, I would like to go record your grades."

"Professor, I think . . . you could use some help," Harry said weakly.

"The day I need your help will be the day hell freezes over." Snape gave him a cold, formal nod. "Good afternoon."

He closed his satchel with a sharp click and tried to move around Harry, who did not give an inch.

"You told Dumbledore you were retiring, Professor," Harry said rapidly. "Was the look on his face everything you hoped it would be? I'm sure you'll be glad to get away from us students, you never know what we'll get into. Maybe then you can even disenchant your rat."

Snape's whole face contorted as if he'd been slapped. Just as quickly it reverted to a smooth scowl, the dark brows lowering, the lines in his face looking deeper than ever. His arms folded across his chest. "If this is some childish attempt at blackmail, Potter, I assure you it won't work."

In Harry's mind some thin string of control fissured with an nearly audible snap. His blood boiling, he blurted, "It's just like you to think of blackmail first off, isn't it? I mean, what kind of sewer do you have for a mind? I came here to _help_ you, you toad, because I think there's something wrong going on, and I could never blackmail you because there's not a thing in this world that you have that I could ever want. What kind of a kid do you think I am, anyway?"

"Your father's son," said Snape. "And it's not a bad thing."

The quiet certainty of those words left Harry disarmed. He felt like all the wind had just been punched out of him. He took a step back, one hand over his pounding heart. Of all the professors on Earth, he'd just popped off to the most dangerous one.

Snape nodded toward the classroom doors, which swung shut and bolted with a thud of finality. Harry searched for an escape, but the only other egress was the narrow barred windows at the peak of the dungeon-like ceiling, and his mouth was so dry he couldn't have gotten off a loud whistle, much less an Apparation spell. He turned, only to come face to face with Snape who planted a hand on his chest and drove him stumbling backwards into a hard high-backed chair that slid across the floor to receive him.

Snape sat back in his own chair, fingers laced. "All right, Potter. For the next fifteen minutes you have my undivided attention. Only take care to remember that I am still your professor, so kindly refrain from calling me a toad."

He actually smiled. Harry had to make himself look elsewhere while he did.

"Well," Harry began. "We found out about you and Professor Evensong."

"Who's 'we'? Never mind, I know. The Fiercesome Trio. You should take care to scatter your associates, Potter; they do tend to define one. May I ask if this information has traveled beyond the three of you?"

"No. We knew about the Nettlesby Ruling. We didn't want you dismissed."

"Really? Thank you. Discretion is a rare quality in a boy your age. And so by your earlier stream of direct quotes I may assume that Yvaine and I were followed. Prompted by concern for my well-being, I imagine. For how long?"

"Since just after lightning hit the oak tree." His heart was thudding now, and he swallowed with a dry click. "I'd been looking for you in Hogsmeade, but the rain started up again and I was almost struck myself. I hid in the greenhouse, but I didn't know you would be there."

Snape rolled his eyes. "Thank heavens for small favours. I was afraid you'd come in earlier. And?"

Harry squeezed his eyes shut. After this point the black spot began and he could see neither through nor around it. "You two were talking. You promised her you'd leave Hogwarts. She said she was cold, and you went back to her--no, that was before. She was . . . crying . . . no, it wasn't her who was crying . . . it was you, you were crying . . . or maybe it was me. I don't know. It's all in the black spot."

_Blackness in the air, and a low hum like a cello, a sound like heaven weeping . . . ._

Snape had gone very still, all expression fading from his face. Harry clenched his fists, eyes still closed. Every word had to be wrenched out, like teeth being pulled. Whatever had happened swam around in his mind, and if he could just close his thoughts around it, he would have it.

"No!" he cried in triumph. "She was singing. Not crying at all. It _was_ you that was crying. Me, too. I kept hearing . . . I thought I heard my mother. Singing to me. And when I heard you, I came to see what was happening, and there was all this stuff like a shadow in the air, and she was swallowing it up like water. And then . . . ."

But it was slipping away; he was losing it again. The memory sank into the black spot once, the way a dream did. He had no idea what he had just said, only that it had been true.

"The reason I collapsed in the library was because I got in the way of a curse," Harry said. "Either you cast it that night, or Professor Evensong did. Now which was it?"

Snape stood, hands folded behind his back, and said nothing. His look was one of grave pity.

"Look, your stinking curse bounced back on me and all I want to know is who to blame for it, her or you."

Any further comment withered under Snape's bitter gaze. The professor turned his back to Harry and began putting used phials into the washing-up pile, talking at Harry rather than to him.

"I've listened to you, Potter," said Snape, "and now you must listen to me. In the past six years I've cashed in a number of favours for you. I won't say how, and I won't say with whom. I will mention that one of them was with Sirius Black, if that means anything to you. All were to insure your continued safety. And all I ask is that you kindly keep yourself out of my personal affairs."

Harry managed a stuttery laugh. "Isn't it only an affair if one of you is married?"

"You might want to take a lesson from Miss Hoeg. Don't make jokes in front of me unless you're certain I'll find them comical."

"But she was draining something out of you. Your life, your soul--_something_."

Without warning Snape threw down one of the phials. It shattered in a starburst of glass at his feet.

"Did you think I didn't know that, Harry Potter?"

Looking into Snape's face, too scared to blink, Harry saw something dreadful there, something old and very tired and almost totally without fear.

"You're a coward," Harry whispered. "You're trying to commit suicide. You're just afraid to do it alone."

Snape picked up his satchel again and looked once more on Harry. "Your fifteen minutes are over, Potter. Best run along."

Through some method Harry didn't understand he was suddenly outside of Potions hall, face to face with the double doors, with his books in his arms and his dragon hide gloves draped over the back of his hand. He took off down the stark corridor, hugging his books to his chest, and didn't stop for the stitch in his ribs until the Fat Lady's portrait closed securely behind him. He leaned against the wall of the unlit portal, breathing deeply, listening to the crackle of the fireplace and the murmured conversation of his housemates. Safe in his own place, safe in Gryffindor.

The brothers Weasley sat at the corner table. George--or possibly Fred--was a picture of despair as he totted up figures on the flyleaf of his Magical Creatures book, while Fred--or it could have been George--sat on the floor with an abacus and a small fortune in Knuts and silver Sickles.

"Hullo, Weasleys." It was best to refer to them this way, as they got furious when people mixed them up. "Turfing going well?"

"The worst year ever," said Fred. "We've paid out close to fifty Galleons."

George crossed out his figures with a flood of black ink. "No luck on anybody turning up in the infirmary from Hagrid's class, nobody been caught in the top floor of main hall, nobody's found Roddy Gorman yet in the cloakroom with Parvati Patel's sister, the Holyhead Harpies are on a losing streak, the Queen and the Pope are still alive, and everybody was so far off on Evensong leaving that Fred and I seriously considered poisoning her ourselves."

Harry's hand closed on the handful of loose Galleons jangling in his pocket. There were ten of them. He laid them on the table in front of George.

"Consider this my donation to enterprising young entrepreneurs. Ten Galleons on Evensong falling off the face of the earth within the next week."

"Are you joshing? This late in the game Evensong's got odds of a hundred twenty to one against."

"No fair poisoning her," warned Fred. "Or pushing her off the roof. Or sneaking off to the internet cafe outside Hogsmeade and doctoring up photos of her and Dumbledore in compromising positions."

"Don't be ridiculous," said Harry. To his surprise his voice had a convincing, natural indignation. "Who'd want to do a thing like that?"


	6. Three Conversations

SIX

"So it didn't work," said Hermione. 

Advanced Spells and Hexes was the only class during which one could get a word (other than "Hush!") out of Hermione. Professor Luddivon tended to repeat himself so many times that if you listened closely for the first twenty minutes you generally got all there was to get from a subject. Hermione had taken to drawing little sketches in her margin of Luddivon pontificating in various poses, his snowy hair sticking up like a dandelion gone to seed and empty cartoon balloons issuing from his mouth. Today's lecture was 'Repellments and Curses: The Differences Between Them.' Hermione had already explained to Ron and Harry what a Repellment was until a sweat broke out on her upper lip, so between the lot of them they could nearly predict what Luddivon's next point would be. The professor was so nearly deaf that one had to shout to be heard, so group whispering was safe enough.

"Don't be nervous, Ron. Ignore him." Hermione nodded down at Luddivon. "Just remember, Repellments _repel_ negative magical energies from the afflicted person. It's like a high-power Cleansing. And curses do the damage. That's all you really need to know for the test." She sighed. "I wish you'd think this whole reconnaissance thing over, Harry."

"They won't meet in the greenhouse again. I think I've cured them of that. The offices are probably out since they're both so close to Dumbledore's. Probably not in their classrooms, either. The haunted chapel?"

"Could be on the top floor with the bats," suggested Ron.

"After we've managed to steer clear of it all this time?" Hermione said. "That's just ironic enough to be likely. Trouble is, this place is full of trysting spots. Unused student dorms, that whole suite behind the Hogwarts Alumni Memorial Yearbook Shelf in the library, the odd room that moves around and you don't know where it's gone. I never really thought about it, but this must be the best place on earth for doing things you shouldn't and not getting found out. I mean, _we_ always get found out, but the teachers almost never do."

"So what are we planning here, exactly?" asked Ron. "Are we out to stop Evensong? What if nothing's happening and Snape is just getting her off somewhere to boff her."

In the collective revulsion that followed, it was unanimously resolved that none of them would ever again use any permutation of the word 'boff' in connection with Snape.

"What if they go to the Forest?"

"Then we'll just have to stick close to them," said Harry. "If there's a way through that Forest then Snape knows it."

"The psychic residue of a curse and a Repellment may appear identical even to the highly trained eye," Luddivon droned on. "Many people who have received a very powerful Repellment are often mistaken for victims of curses. Now, can anyone tell me--"

"I think it's time we let the professors take over, Harry," said Hermione. "This one's too big for us."

__

"No!"

It came just after a pause in the lecture and everybody jumped. 

Luddivon clapped his hands. "Exactly right, Potter! There is no way of identifying the causal agent--the wizard, as it were--behind a Repelling. Five to Gryffindor for the prompt answer. There are, however, ways of determining the originators of certain curses, which, if you will turn your books to page 1125--"

"No," said Harry again, more calmly. "Like it or not, Snape has saved my life more times than probably we any of us know. I owe him."

"Harry, Sirius said don't get in over your head. Who do you think you are, anyway?"

Without thinking Harry replied, "Odysseus."

* * *

The Defence Against the Dark Arts hall was almost unrecognisable this year, as Evensong had insisted that the heavy, dark draperies and shutters be opened, so that even the complete troll skeleton in the corner took on a buttery glow in the late-afternoon sun. In the sun it was hard to keep in mind that this was a school that had once owned a flesh-eating three-headed canine, and Evensong's discussion on Unseen Menaces in Fens and Bogs had taken on new levity when a sparrow flew through the open window and was trapped until Courtland Thomas thought to catch it in his cloak and toss it out again. 

As Harry edged past the professor on his way to the door, his long shadow fell across Professor Evensong's desk. Evensong's lavender-grey eyes flicked up and caught him. She put her quill back into her inkpot.

"Mister Potter," she said, in a low voice. "Could I have a word alone with you?"

It was certainly the most polite invitation to an execution he could expect. Evensong gestured toward a chair, then folded her hands on her desk. Her braid had loosened in the course of the day and white tendrils framed her face in a soft fringe.

"You know, don't you?" 

Something about her entreating expression made lying out of the question. Harry nodded.

"Severus told me as much. I should have guessed from the way you were behaving." She reached across the desk and took his hand. "I'm asking you to forget everything that you might have seen. Don't try to remember anything more; it doesn't concern you. And don't say anything else to upset Severus."

There was a short pause during which Harry attempted to conceive of anything so dire it might upset Professor Snape.

"Okay. Done. Forgotten." He tried to take his hand away, but short of a single violent jerk there was nothing he could do. Evensong's touch, though gentle as she rolled his hand in hers, was strong, like steel springs under her skin.

"Don't be so nervous. I don't want to hurt you. It's just that it's in my nature to fight for the things I care, and it's very difficult for me to break that instinct. Here at Hogwarts, I've had to learn to fight in other ways."

She broke off suddenly, staring first at Harry's palm, then into his eyes, then down again. The loose hairs which hung round her face swayed and lifted as if from electricity, and her voice took on a mellow, ringing depth.

"There's a darkness in you, Harry." She ran her nail down the centre of his palm, and he felt the scratch down his spine. "When I performed your Cleansing in the infirmary, I knew it was my own spell I was ridding you of. I didn't say anything, then, because I was afraid that if some of the story came out, then it all would. But I saw the darkness then, just as I sense it in you now. It's very near the surface, Harry. You must know yourself that it's there. If you wanted . . . I could make it go away."

_Black water swelling . . . somewhere his mother was singing . . . ._

"No, Professor. If it's all the same, I think I like my darkness just where it is." 

Her fingernail traced the same lingering, tickling path on his palm. "A pity. Dark calls to dark, Mister Potter. You wouldn't want to attract the wrong sort of people."

She let go of his hand just as he yanked it away. His own force drove him to his feet. She rose as well, tall and pale as a young birch, azure robes rustling. Her light hand rested on his shoulder.

"The offer stands, if you should ever decide," she said. "Until then, please. Forget. All we want is to be left alone."

Her hand slid away, slipping down his upper arm to the elbow in a prolonged caress that drew a knot in Harry's throat. She turned her back to him, and began to gather her things, and suddenly she was very young-looking, younger than Hermione perhaps, and very lonely. With a great pain Harry pushed aside the yearning to put his arms around her, let her know it would be okay, that he would leave her and Snape alone and perhaps it would be a very good idea for her to take the darkness away because it _did_ hurt . . . and _why was he agreeing with everything she'd said?_

It took everything in him to walk out the door, but with every step the weird compulsion to succumb grew smaller. By the time he turned the corner at the end of the hall and began down the stairs toward the library, the memory dwindled, sank into blackness, leaving only an aching emptiness where it had been. Only a shuddery feeling and the slow dull thud of his heart reminded him of how effortless, how satisfying it had been to surrender. He took the last two flights of stairs at a gallop, and when he finally paused at the bottom landing his heart was racing, but his mind was clear. 

That was when Ginny Weasley touched his elbow and he damn near levitated.

"Hullo, Harry. Sorry. Didn't mean to scare you. I thought you heard me."

"Give me a moment, Gin," he said, leaning against the stair post. "I've temporarily forgotten how to breathe."

"Okay." She waited patiently, as if Harry hyperventilating was a common occurrence. At just shy of fifteen Ginny had grown up to be a fashion model for the Hermione Granger Line of Girls' Schoolwear: red, frizzy hair chopped short at the neck, reading glasses, a pink pullover jumper with a large red _G_ on it, and her textbooks bound together with a strap. She had a sprightly, chipmunky grin and her inexhaustible energy levels gave her the impression of wiggling even when she was standing still. Looking at her, Harry instantly felt more drained than before.

"I'm supposed to give you a message," she said when he seemed to have regained control over about seventy five per cent of his bodily functions. "Ron says forget about the library, just go back to your room as the library is being fumigated. Some moths started chewing on a book in the Restricted Area and accidentally nibbled a Duplicating Spell, and now the place is full of 'em. Miss Pince had a complete nervous breakdown."

Irritably he wondered why couldn't she have caught him before he was down three flights of stairs. "Thanks, Ginny."

"Are you boys up to no good?"

"Yes."

"Ooh, can I come?"

"I . . . don't think so, Ginny. Thanks for telling me, though."

"No problem." Her gold-speckled nose wrinkled. "Have you been eating peppermints, or do you smell like peppermints all the time?" 

"Not that I've noticed. I'm not too fond of peppermints." Weird kid. That's what happened when you were the only girl in the Weasley brood. 

"You certainly smell of peppermints." She shrugged one shoulder. "See you about, then."

Ginny took off down the hallway, swinging her books by their strap. Harry sighed and, turning around, began the weary climb up the stairs to Gryffindor, wishing as always that Hogwarts would just install lifts like every other place in the world. Even a magical lift would do.

It wasn't until she'd skipped off down the hall that Ginny realized her mistake. She could have slapped herself; he must think she was totally thick. Not peppermints. Cinnamon. 


	7. Doing Time in Hogwarts

__

Author's note: In this chapter, HP_ cognoscenti will notice that the Hogwarts timeline has been tampered with. Just a little, I promise. _

SEVEN

Harry entered the Gryffindor Commons after class and paused just inside the portal whole to find that the whole large room had been transformed into a lush world of red-and-green tinsel, holly wreathes, and gold candles burning on the mantelpiece. It was the first day of December, and he'd somehow forgotten about Christmas. Elaine Parker and her younger sister Yolanda were pointing their wands at every available surface, causing poinsettias to blossom out of bare wood. Apparently they'd been at it quite a while. Before he could take in all the decorations, Yolanda squealed and pointed. "Look! Potter's under the mistletoe! Get him!"

The two girls rushed at him, giggling, and he only just made it to the tapestry and up the stairs to the boys' dorm. 

Just as Harry walked into the room he shared with Ron, Hermione emerged from the toilet, drying her hands on a towel. "You know," she said cheerily, "I've never been in a boy's loo before. You have very odd commodes."

Ron looked at Harry and tapped his temple. "That's Hermione for you. Top marks in class, knows everything there is to know about the magical world, never misses a question in Wizardly Pursuit, yet still intrigued by the concept of a lidless toilet."

Hermione unloaded her ubiquitous stack of books from Harry's bed, centralizing them in a pile on the floor. "I'm only intrigued by how you find your bed under that mess of schoolbooks and sweets wrappers, Ron, but that's for another day. Are you sure this is safe? It's seventy-five points if I'm caught in the boys' dorm."

"How did you sneak her in here?"

"Borrowed your cloak. Do you mind?"

"Not any more, obviously." Harry sat down on the floor near Ron, leaving the comfy chair for Hermione who, blithely brushing aside the attempted chivalry, threw herself to the rug with the rest of them. 

"You arrived just in time, Harry, Ron's just been brilliant."

"I'm sorry I missed it, then. Ron being brilliant is like Haley's comet. Happens once every seventy-six years."

"Stuff it, Potter," growled Ron. "Hermione and I were just discussing the information she found about the BBC."

"The _baobhan sith_." Hermione had the rare quality of being able to correct someone for the thousandth time with as much patience as though it were the first. She picked up the first leather-bound volume in the heap, unlocked it, flipped through all the pages, set it aside, and picked up the next. "Ron just remembered our third year Dark Arts class, the one we had under Lupin, when everybody was taking on the boggart. Remember when Seamus's turn came up, and it turned into a banshee?"

"And before that it turned into Snape in Neville's grandmother's hat," said Ron. "That's what put the two together for me. The banshee, I mean, not Snape in the hat--although that's still bloody hilarious. Professor Evensong doesn't look much like that green-faced screaming thing, I'll tell you." 

"Harry, take that red book from the bottom of the stack and turn to where I've stuck the scrap of parchment in."

The book's title had so flaked away that the title appeared to be have been eaten, and the gilt from the paper's edge clung to his fingers as he searched. Here and there a chapter heading stuck out: 'Etiquette to be Observ'd When Dining With Thee Kinge of Faerie' was one. A single conspicuous woodcut occupied the whole of the marked page. It showed a wild-haired creature, its face covered by peeling scales and black teeth surrounding the hole that was its mouth, floating in the air above a number of astonished Muggle peasants. Its black garb was covered in a pattern of stars and moons, and long swooping lines which Harry took as a representation of a gust of wind flowed from the monster's mouth. Beneath the woodcut a legend ran: _Onct yearlie thee bayvhan shee is sayd to call for them._

"Yes!" cried Harry. "That's it exactly. I'd almost forgotten about the boggart."

__

Hermione turned the brittle page and tapped a line. It was in Gaelic, meaning nothing to Harry's mind, and he glanced at Hermione for a translation. __

"Years, Harry. The _baobhan sith_ needs to steal years, to keep young."

"Why pick Snape, then? He can't be the youngest person here. He's been teaching sixty years."

"Don't you even notice what's under your own nose? Does Snape _look _sixty? Does he even look forty?"

Harry had to admit it was true.

"None of the teacher here _look_ the proper age because none of them _are_ the proper age. I thought you said you'd read _Hogwarts: A History_."

"I never said I read all of it."

"Look." Hermione heaved a book to the floor and cracked it to a well-worn, ink-splattered page. She must have brought a selection from shelf in the library. The two boys leaned over her head to read. "All the professors at Hogwarts sign a standard Magical Scholarship contract. If they reach tenure they're hired for a term of a hundred fifty years, ruling out death or disbarment. During that time they are granted an Aging Immunity which extends until they choose to leave the school, at which time they resume their normal life. Snape came here in 1941, when he was thirty-six. McGonagall started teaching in 1950 when she was forty."

Harry put his finger on a column. "And this long list here are Dark Arts professors who didn't survive to make tenure?"

"Yes."

"And Dumbledore?" asked Ron.

Hermione frowned. "I don't know about Dumbledore. He's not in any of the listings. " 

"It seems rather inconvenient," said Harry doubtfully.

"It does, a bit. According to the records, Helga Hufflepuff instated the Aging Immunity rule to prevent replacement problems in the event of a wartime teacher shortage. Of course, that was during the Punic Wars. Point is, Snape came _in _ thirty-six and he's going to _be_ thirty-six until he leaves. Then his real time starts back again. But he _won't_ be thirty-six because the years Evensong took off were real time, not Hogwarts time. If

he resigns, the minute his signature's on the page he could instantly be ninety. Or he could just fall over dead. It's basic Arithmancy."

"And that would be a handy method of killing yourself, wouldn't it?" muttered Harry. "Sign your name on the line, then just keel over."

"Killing yourself?" Hermione shut the book sharply. Thick yellow dust mixed with elderly paper particles puffed up. "What's all this about killing yourself?"

"I don't know. I've just gotten out of two very nasty confrontations with two very scary people. All I want is a bath, a hot cocoa, and a nap by the fire. That's all I ever wanted out of life, and I don't care if I sound like Eliza Doolittle. If only for one year, I'd like to simply go to class, do my studies, win the Quidditch Cup, and go to sleep without worrying whether or not the morning will mean my getting dead at the hands of some indescribably unpleasant monster. If this is too much to ask from an educational programme, tell me now and I'll never say another word."

Hermione's face squinched up. "Do you have gum or something, Harry?"

In a burst of comprehension Ron pounded his fist against the carpet. "Yes! Thank you, Hermione, I've been wondering what that was for two days now!"

"Would everybody please stop talking round my head and tell me what the heck is going on?" said Harry.

"Ever since you got back from the infirmary you've been reeking of cinnamon gum, only I couldn't figure out just what it was. Thought I'd forgotten a package of Dimona's Four-Alarm Cinnamon Crackerbombs on top of the fire mantel."

Harry looked at Ron blankly. "Smelling sweets on people must be a genetic trait dominant only in Weasleys. Your sister just asked me if I'd been sucking peppermints, which I hate."

"It is pretty heavy," admitted Ron. "Especially just now."

"Never mind how I smell. Professor Evensong wants to rid me of my darkness, whatever that means, and Professor Snape is either stupidly in love, mad, or just plan stupid. That's the latest from the front lines." He turned to Hermione. "I all but shoved the lighter in his face and told him I'd seen everything. He didn't even blink hard. And Evensong caught up with me after class and begged me not to try and remember anything else. Her major concern seems to be that I might upset him. I don't think you could 'upset' Snape if you lit fire to him."

"Did that once," Ron reminded him. "It worked. You never did tell me what you saw that night when you followed them."

"Who cares what I saw? I've been trying to forget it ever since I saw it. And so far it's working because I _can't_ remember anything."

"I've translated the laying ceremony. Here." Another paper mark stuck out toward the 

back of the book, covered with Hermione's precise, tiny scribbling . She drew it out and handed it to Harry. "There's only just one tiny problem with it."

"What?"

"Well . . . have you ever heard how Muggles got rid of vampires in the old days?" 

Harry read aloud. "'The sharp branch of a rowan, wrapped in a blood-soaked thread, and thrown true at the monster, will drive into its heart and destroy it utterly. But to unleash the _baobhan sith_'sunlucky prey, one must determined first its key. The noise of various chimes does distract the beast, and make it to lose its bearings, though it try to take away its pursuers with its dreadful shriek.' You mean we'll have to actually kill her?" 

"We're not going to kill anybody," said Hermione sharply. "I for one won't do _any_thing without some sort of proof that she really is a _baobhan sith_. This is all still too chancy for me. And I'd go to Dumbledore before I'd let either of you try it, and damn the consequences." Hermione sat back on her heels, frowning as she studied the translation for a loophole. "The difficult part is getting close enough to perform the ritual without the _baobhan sith'_s song taking the person into its thrall. Otherwise he'll just do whatever she says."

"What's this about a key?" asked Harry.

"The key is a term for whatever the _baobhan sith_ puts upon her victims to mark them as her own, and to lure them to her for her feeding. Banshees do something like to their territory, to keep other magical creatures away. The tricky part is determining what the key is, because it could be anything--a certain sound, or a word. An object. It could even be a particular colour."

"Could it be a scent?" Ron asked unexpectedly.

Hermione's head lifted sharply from her study of the laying ceremony. "I suppose it might could."

After a moment's indecision, both Ron and Hermione timidly shifted a few inches away from Harry. Harry stared down at himself in horror. He lifted the tail of his shirt to his nose and took a deep whiff. It smelled like nothing more than _shirt_--a combination of cotton, sweat, and the Fresh-Cut Lemon scent-o-spell the laundry house-elves put on all the clothes they cleaned.

"I don't smell it."

"I do," said Ron. Beside him Hermione nodded, her brown eyes huge behind her reading glasses.

"Snape smelled of cinnamon earlier. That's why Jenni was laughing. I couldn't think why." Harry turned the page back. Trapped behind the frame of the woodcut, the _baobhan sith _glowered over her victims. _Onct yearlie thee bayvhan shee is sayd to call for them._

Hushabye . . . don't you cry . . . go to sleep my little baby . . . .

"They come because she calls to them in a voice they recognise," said Harry slowly. "Then they can't resist it. I heard my mother. Somehow she knew what my mother meant to me, and she used it." His voice dropped to a growl, thinking, _she used me; she found the place it would hurt most and dug her claws in deep._ The memory of shivering in the cold while trying to sob in total silence was so close that he shook in spite of himself. "I could barely keep in place when I heard it, even though I knew I had to. When I heard it . . . I just went."

Hermione suddenly, viciously wadded up the laying ritual and flung it into the corner. "Damn it all! I've translated this seven ways 'til Sunday and this is the only option! But I can't allow it, I can't, I _can't! _If she is a _baobhan sith_, you're in danger, Harry, but Snape is in danger worse. But we've got to be absolutely sure before . . . well, before we do anything, um, permanent."

In the far top tower, the bell rang: eight slow, heavy strokes.

Hermione raked both hands through her hair in pure aggravation. Pushing her way between the boys, she retrieved the ball of paper from its spot under Ron's bedside table, smoothing it flat again. Neither of them had ever seen Hermione explode quite that way before, even at her worst. She played with the paper for much longer than necessary, with her back to them and her face hidden behind a swatch of brown hair.

"I've got to go back to the girls' dorm," she muttered, as if in apology for the outburst. "Someone will miss me. Will you walk me there, Harry? Ron got all grabby last time he had me alone under the cloak."

"I already told you--your stupid _books_ were _slipping._ I was trying to catch them."

This whole thing between Hermione and Ron was rapidly degenerating into a vast, immature range of logic, on the level of the did-not-did-too fights Harry remembered from childhood, and between them and the Evensong affair he was suddenly tired of dealing with it--tired of dealing with everything, truth be told. Baths and naps and uneventful school careers were starting to seem like things that happened to other people. He tossed the cloak off his bed and threw it hard at Hermione, who caught it, wide-eyed.

"I'll gather your books, Hermione. Wait for me in the Commons."

She nodded, then slipped the cloak over her head and promptly vanished. Footsteps across the room, muffled by the carpet; a second later the door opened itself, and closed.

Hoping she was really gone and not just shamming, Harry scooped up the books, making a gesture for Ron to load the rest on him. In silence they gathered up the last of them, and Ron held the door open. 

Harry started out, paused in the doorway, started again, then decided that if it didn't get said now it never would. He glared at Ron. "If you like Hermione, just say something to her. The worst she could tell you is piss off, and she won't, because she's Hermione and even if she hated your guts she'd never tell you off like that. But tell her. I for one am very tired of sitting in the middle while you two bicker around the subject. It gets old very quickly."

Leaving Ron to gape, he headed out to the Commons. 

The Commons were empty, save for a lone Gryffindor asleep in a chair by the fire with a book across his lap. Harry saw a mug of cocoa on the floor beside him and nearly cried. Just behind him, Hermione pushed the hood back from her face and reappeared, eyes dark and quiet behind her reading glasses. She took a share of the books and stood looking at him.

"I heard you telling Ron off," she said.

"Sorry. You two are getting to be a little much."

"I honestly don't mean to, you know I don't. It's just that sometimes something about that boy just rubs me the wrong way." 

Harry grinned. "You don't have to sleep in the same room with him."

Hermione scuffed one foot against the floor and looked away from him, as if this small confidence had required enormous trust. Aside from the faint snoring by the fireside, the room was very still.

"What do you think is going on with Evensong? Honest, now."

"From what I know now, I don't think she's a baobhan sith, and if she is she's an incredibly clever one to sneak herself into Hogwarts. I think she's got Snape in her grip, but she's not particularly interested in you. I think she was casting a spell on him when you followed them to the greenhouse, and you wandered into the line of fire. When she did your Cleansing in the infirmary, she would have recognised her own spell, but she didn't try a counter-spell--either because Pomfrey and MacGonagall might have seen her or because for some reason she didn't want to. And I think if she shows you any untoward interest, ever, you should run and hide underneath Dumbledore's desk until he says it's safe to come out again."

"What about Snape, then?"

From a lower floor came a low rumbling sound--the main staircase shifting, or perhaps a distant mutter of thunder. Hermione cleared her throat. "Leave him alone."

"But--"

She held up a finger for silence. "No, Harry. Toad or not, he's probably the best wizard in this school next to Dumbledore, and if he really wanted to protect himself from her, he would have already done it. And if it's as you say, and he's really so stupidly in love with her that he hasn't even noticed what's happening--leave him to hang himself, I'd say."

"I can't do that."

"Oh, you and your noble impulses. I know you can't. Or won't. With you it's all the same." 

Her mouth screwed up, her soft face twisting. For a moment Harry thought she was about to cry, but her dark eyes remained still and clear. Awkwardly, he shifted the weight of the books in his arms and put his hand on her shoulder, but she nudged it away. A small smile bloomed in her eyes; she took off her glasses and rubbed them with her knuckle.

"Silly boy," she said. "I've got to go to bed."

All at once the whole room seemed to vibrate under their feet, low at first but rapidly becoming a violent shaking that sent Hermione lurching against the wall. Harry grabbed her instinctively, trying to steady them both, but as it mounted louder and more insistent they both collapsed to their knees, books dropping like thunder and shimmying on the floor as if a current ran through them. The sleeping Gryffindor work with a start as the painting above the fire fell with a crash of glass shards. The very stones seemed to detach from each other and rattle together like loose teeth as a wail rose from deep within Hogwarts, something that began like an old air-raid siren and swiftly surged to a high-pitched crescendo that set Harry's teeth on edge. It sounded like someone being flayed alive.

Gryffindors flooded the Commons, all of them fighting to be heard, some of the girls crying in terror while their friends tried to calm them, but there could be no calming while that horrid sound went on and on, louder than Harry could imagine anything being and still gaining volume. Hermione shouted something at him, but she might have been a character in a silent movie, lips moving to words that didn't exist.

"What?" he shouted at her, and she leaned her head against his neck and said again, "Either that's her, or the Jerries have been sighted off the coast!"

It did not merely die out, but cut off short, just in the middle of one of those nerve-rattling wails. The silence in its wake was stunning, the only sound coming from a first-year desperately trying to choke back her sobs. Everyone else held perfectly still, hardly daring to breathe, as if attracting any attention would start it up again. 

Exactly as the floor ceased trembling, Professor MacGonagall stepped through the portal hole.

"All students go directly to your rooms," she said brusquely. Harry saw a red trickle going down the side of her cheek; her ears were bleeding. "Everything is being taken care of, and an official explanation will be given in the morning. Any student not in his or her room when I return will receive detention and a hundred points off. Go to."

"Official explanation, my arse," muttered George Weasley as he headed back toward the boys' wing.

Ron appeared from the other side of the room, kneeling beside Harry and Hermione. "Any idea what that was?"

"Evensong." Hermione quivered all over--they were all shaking; it seemed not feasible to do anything else--but otherwise she was level-headed, almost serene. "There's nothing else it could have been." 

"You don't think--"

"No, if the teachers are on it then she's done for anyway. Why are you holding your head like that, Harry? Ears still ringing?"

"My scar." His green eyes were bright with pain. "Whatever it was, it was a bloody close call.


	8. All Things are Inevitable

EIGHT

At a special assembly in the morning, Hermione's original suspicions were confirmed as it was announced that an agent of Voldemort had attempted a security breech. The agent--unnamed, although it was made plain that it had not been You-Know-Who himself--had gotten as far as the sub-cellar before being apprehended, so yes, he had been in the school and yes, it was perfectly all right to have a moment of real panic. Said moment having been observed, it was then declared that all trips to Hogsmeade were prohibited for the remainder of the school year (groans from the student body) and students were to not to venture out of their dorms after sunset, with double points taken from anyone caught doing so and swift, merciless, non-negotiable consequences, up to but not excluding torture, for second offenders. After this ominous remark everyone was dismissed to first classes. Of course, after a proclamation like that, pursuit of higher learning was the farthest thing from anyone's mind.

Before Harry could completely escape the assembly hall, Dumbledore caught sight of him through the crowd. He nodded softly. Harry tapped Hermione's arm, told her to wait, and then proceeded to the headmaster.

"Those rules go double for you, Harry," said Dumbledore. "You know why, don't you?"

"Because whomever it was in the sub-cellar last night was trying to get to me."

"Yes. Fortunately we had heard that there might be such an attempt, although we never expected anyone to make such a bold move. Evensong stated that it appeared to be only a spy who was driven off easily. Outside school grounds, it might have been something worse. So no slipping out after dark. No midnight crusades, no espionage. Which is why I must ask you to give over the cloak."

Harry blinked a few times, hoping he looked sufficiently surprised. "What cloak?"

Dumbledore sighed. "The cloak that every teacher in Hogwarts has known about since I gave it to you six Christmases ago. You'll get it back at the end of the term, but for now I must ask that you hand it over. You can bring it to my office after class today. The password is 'chocolate frog'. If you don't, McGonagall will be in your room to confiscate it at seven o'clock this evening."

"Don't bother," he muttered. "I'll give it over, sir."

"Thank you, Harry, for being reasonable."

"Why didn't you tell me earlier, if you knew that Vol--You-Know-Who would be trying something this year?"

"Well, for one thing, we didn't want you to walk around in a bubble of fear all year, did we? Especially since we didn't know exactly what might happen, or when. In most cases it's best to err on the side of caution."

"So you hired on Professor Evensong as extra night security." Instantly he wished he could take it back. There it was, all his suspicions laid out in ten words or less. He did his best to make himself relax. On second thought he hadn't said half of what he thought he might have said. 

Dumbledore only nodded. "Yes, we did. Evensong is very fond of you already, Mister Potter, and she's equally devoted to protecting Hogwarts. With her kind, that's a fortunate thing. You've no cause to be worried. Your safety is very much my highest priority." Dumbledore patted Harry's back. "Now go to class before Pontifus rips you limb from limb."

Harry headed glumly back to the main passage, where Hermione waited expectantly near the door, a puzzled look on her face. He filled her in on Evensong as they both headed through the Old Wing, then added the grim news of the looming cloak confiscation. She was so cheered by the former that the news of the cloak seemed to bounce right off her. Harry reminded himself to tell Ron, who at least would have the fraternal courtesy to commiserate.

"Then they _are_ using Evensong as a watchdog, I _knew_ I was right," Hermione said. 

"I told you. Even when you're wrong, you're right. I almost feel sorry for the person she caught, whoever he was; he'll be deaf for life. We'll never know, though. They never tell us what really goes on around this place."

"I'll find out," Hermione said with such confidence that Harry looked cynical. "I have sources in high places. How else do you think I find these things out?"

"You have Hagrid, who tells us everything then tells us that he shouldn't have told us."

"Well, yes. But I have a few other tricks up my sleeve. You'd be surprised what information people are willing to volunteer when you look at them like _this_." Hermione put on a beseeching facade, pushed her reading glasses to the very tip of her nose. Her brown eyes glazed over to a mawkish puppy-dog shine. "Professor, couldn't you just tell me a bit more about what happened last night? You know I'll keep it absolutely to myself; when has your top pupil ever disappointed you?"

"You git!" Harry said, laughing. "I always knew there was something more to the good-girl act than trying to get better grades."

"Of course there is. You can't improve on perfection."

He was close to replying with something snide, but instead he shook his head and changed the subject. "Hermione, something's been bothering me. You know what you said last night, about the Aging Immunity ruling? How exactly does that work?"

"I don't know. And don't ask me to find out. You still owe me a favour for all the other research I've done for you lately." 

On the verge of Harry reminding her that she'd taken on half the research of her own volition, Hermione took his sleeve and drew him to the edge of the corridor. Evensong was passing on the far side, going the opposite direction, talking in low tones to Madame Hooch. Harry had heard the two of them were getting close, but had never seen them together. Evensong had her hood drawn over her face; from this angle there was no getting a good look at her expression. Hooch, on her way to first period flying lessons, wore her usual black-and-white referee's robes, with a silver whistle on a long chain around her neck. 

"Well, I must say his mood's definitely improved," Madame Hooch was saying.

"I've heard stories of his famous moods ever since I came here. Dumbledore warned me from the start that he'd try to run me out of my position. Why does he want the Dark Arts job so badly?"

"Because he'd be really good at it," said Madame Hooch archly. "You know he was connected with You-Know-Who's lot for a while."

"Yes, I know," she said, though her thoughts were obviously elsewhere. "Calpurnia, I don't understand why the controversy. I never asked the man to quit. I even told him I thought he should stay. But he said it was what he wanted. It troubles me. I almost could believe . . . . "

Evensong dropped to a more confidential voice as the pair of them continued down the hall, but before Hermione and Harry could get any nearer, the Draconian Army swept by with Malfoy at its centre, armoured within a tight knot of his cronies and his arm around his latest girl, Antoinette: a sleek, sharp blonde who resembled nothing so much as a particularly lethal breed of swan. Antoinette took most of the same Advanced classes as Hermione, and as far as Harry knew the two girls had the same sort of relationship as he and Draco did, albeit with more hair-pulling. Antoinette deliberately brushed shoulders with Hermione as they passed each other, just as Goyle knocked into Harry on the other side.

"Have a good night's sleep, Potter?" Malfoy called.

"Yeah," Harry muttered to himself. "Like Carrie had a good prom." The reference would have been lost on Malfoy, he knew, and with all the rest going on he didn't want to add Malfoy to his escalating list of Things to Avoid Like Plague.

Hermione let out her breath once Antoinette had safely passed. "Phew. And I've got to go to next class with that walking Sindi doll." 

"About the Aging Immunity. Something's struck me as fishy about it. Snape is listed as having been teaching here for sixty years."

"All right, all right, I'll look it up. Catch up to me after classes, okay?" She tapped Harry's shoulder and started off down the hall. "See you in the Commons with the latest."

Without much hope, Harry headed into Arithmancy like a prisoner headed up the scaffold to the hangman's noose.

* * * 

Evensong entered class swathed in her dark cloak, the hood drawn forward so that its purple shadow fell over most of her face. Her voice possessed a sharper edge than was customary, the brogue more abrasive and pronounced. For the first time since she arrived she did not immediately request that someone open the curtains, but went to her podium and launched into a vehement lecture on Hungry Grass (a round patch of grass, generally a dark greeny-blue compared to the surrounding area, caused when a victim of the Irish Famine fell dead of starvation, which drained the strength of any person who trod on it) and what could be done to counteract it (remove the victim to a safe location and immediately supply them with food, especially apples; burn over the patch of Hungry Grass with white-fire oil and sow the earth with salt). She had brought a cultivated sample of the Grass with her in a potting tub, and was looking for volunteers to be victims and rescuers. Needless to say, she got none.

"Come on, you lot. You _are_ being graded for participation. Don't make me start calling you up." After a few more impatient taps of her foot, she shook her head. "Fine, then. _You_."

Her voice changed to that commanding, ringing tone as she levelled a finger at Julie Hulme, a nervous little midge of a thing and the shortest sixth year in Gryffindor, a good head shorter than even Harry. Julie jumped to her feet as if she'd sat on a hot stove, though she looked entirely uncertain as to what she was doing. "You're the first victim. _And you, Mister Potter-_-" Harry's head lifted up from his determined please-don't-pick-me prayer. "--you can rescue her. Both of you, to the front. _Now._ The rest of you, watch closely."

Dead white beneath her thousands of freckles, Julie clambered onto the tub of grass. After half a minute, she started looking as if she was going to lose her lunch; a minute more, and she looked as if she hadn't had any lunch for about a week. Her knees buckled. She swayed back and forth before her eyes rolled back in her head and she crumpled into a small heap of skirts, skinny limbs, and brown plaits. The class gasped in alarm, leaning forward--then burst into a round of applause. 

Evensong held up her hands for quiet. "Under normal circumstances it would have taken nearly half an hour for Miss Hulme to reach her current state, as Hungry Grass in the wild suppresses the natural desire to step away from it. The longer the victim stays, the weaker she grows, and the weaker she is, the greater the desire to remain in the same spot. As you see, this patch is working much faster than normal, and its strength increases with every victim. I understand Professor Sprout's been feeding this one on rabbits for several months now. Mister Potter, move Miss Hulme clear of the Grass."

Harry linked his arms under Julie's armpits and lifted her about an inch before her whole body slumped, heavy as lead, and slid out of his grip. He tried again, then tried pushing her, then rolling her. Her slight body seemed as firmly lodged as a rock.

"Oh, dear." Evensong sounded worried. "Keep hold of her arms, Harry, I'll take her legs. Ready on three. One . . . two . . . . _oof!_"

With both of them straining on either end, Julie became barely transportable. They carried her to an empty chair, Evensong speaking calmly as they went.

"As Mister Potter has just demonstrated, the body of a victim seems to get heavier the longer it remains on the Grass. I didn't expect the pull to get quite so strong so quickly, or I would have had you removed Miss Hulme at once. Any creature trapped by Hungry Grass finds itself immune to a standard _mobilicorpus _spell, so it's important to lift or drag away the victim as quickly as possible. But, as we travel farther from the source, will you describe to the class what you are currently observing, Mister Potter?"

"Getting lighter," he said. "She's almost back to normal again."

"This is a sign that the victim is coming back around. Help me sit her in the chair, please." She snapped her fingers, and a dainty china plate of fresh apple slices manifested in her hand. She held the plate under the girl's nose, and the scent seemed to rouse her; Julie made a sleepy sound, eyelids fluttering. "Good rescue, Mister Potter. You may take your seat." 

"Yes, Professor," he replied, settling Julie's arm into a comfortable position in her lap. Without thinking he glanced up at Evensong and for a moment saw directly into what lay beneath her shadowy hood.

Evensong's face was white--not merely pale as before but deathly, leprous white tinged with bottle green. Her mouth seemed caved in, as if there were no teeth behind the lips; the single strand of hair that fell beside her face had gone from snowy blonde to a straggly yellow-grey. Cavernous brown shadows deepened the hollows in her cheeks, around her temples, and her sockets of her eyes, and the eyes themselves were bleary-red with burst vessels radiating from the piercing blue-grey irises. He should have looked at her eyes first; they were bright as blood, staring directly at him, taking in his expression with wild, barely restrained anger. 

"Take your seat, Mister Potter," she whispered.

From between them there was a loud whimper and both of them looked down just in time to see Julie's head loll backwards before her body glided off the edge of the chair to the floor--passed out yet again. Apparently she, too, had gotten a good look under the hood. 

* * * 

As the last toll of the six o'clock bell faded, Harry shut his book (Topsell's _The Historie of Foure-Footed Beastes--_for Hagrid, of course), stood from his desk, and went to his trunk, where his cloak lay on top like a folded sheet of moonlight. He shook it out to its full silvery length and gazed on it in sad contemplation. "Moment of silence for my cloak, please, Ron."

Ron whipped off an imaginary cap and began humming 'Taps.'

"Ha-ha." Harry addressed the cloak. "Well, cloak, we've had some amazing adventures together whenever I could get Ron and Hermione out of my hair for ten minutes. [Ron stuck out his tongue.] We have travelled this ancient halls, old friend, and in the dead of night you have taken me to places that have lain unexplored and unexploited by any other Hogwarts student, except for maybe Ron's brothers. May you sleep comfortably in whatever dusty locked trunk Dumbledore intends for you, and flights of mothballs sing thee to thy rest."

"Amen," said Ron. "You know, you have a couple of hours left with each other. Shall I leave you two alone?"

"Nah. It deserves a dignified end, not the Holy Terror sending the prefect up for it. From my hands to Dumbledore's, and then . . . ." He folded it back into a bundle and sighed. "Well, I'll have it back for the summer, anyway. I can still terrorise Dudley." Folding the bundle over his arm, he started on the final long trek to Dumbledore's office.

"That's right, Harry, keep looking ahead." Ron bent over his books again.

* * *

Through the windows of Main Hall, the winter sky was fully dark. The enormous statues of Hogwarts professors long dead and gone lined the hall, narrowing it to an uncomfortable closeness, and their bizarre realism always gave the impression that they were all too aware of people passing between them. Rumour went that all these effigies has been crafted at great expense to offset the floor, which curved ever so slightly inward. It was never reassuring to know that the perfect equilibrium of several thousand tons of marble depended on the mad architects of Hogwarts. As he came up the path, a shadow flicker on the far wall, growing larger as it approached. 

" . . . ask you for help? Did I ask you for anything at all?" It was impossible to mistake that clear, ringing voice for anyone else. 

The nearest thing at hand was a twice life-sized statue of Lord Edward the Slightly Confused. Harry ducked into the niche between the statue's base and the wall and squeezed himself as far back as he could, just as Evensong moved swiftly around the bend in the corridor, dressed in white, the most visible thing in the dim hallway. As she passed his hiding spot, Harry saw that her eyes were closed, her lips pressed tight together; she was walking as fast as she could without breaking into a jog. The light was too gloomy to tell if her face had returned to normal, although it had that smudgy look around the hollows of the eyes that made him think it had not. If she hadn't been speaking as she approached, he never would have heard her at all; she moved like one of the house ghosts, as if she never touched the floors at all. 

Close behind her followed Snape, who all but exuded a dark cloud of rage. With an extra lunge of speed, he caught up to her and seized hold of her wrist, forcing her to face him. She pulled her arm through his fingers as if he had tried to clutch a handful of fog. 

"You were the one who said you didn't want to speak to me, so why are you still following me?" she said.

"I think I've said quite too much to you already. It's time I had a few explanations."

"I'm supposed to be on duty. Anything you want discuss can wait until morning."

He moved himself into her path, making it clear there would be no avoiding him. From the looks of him he might throw her against a wall if she tried to step away from him. His dark eyes caught a gleam of torchlight, turning them a pale orange. "You know as well as I do that nothing more will happen. We'll discuss it now." 

They were drawing dangerously close to his spot behind the statue when Harry remembered he was carrying the cloak. Under cover of their conversation he drew it out and slipped it on. 

Evensong's eyes narrowed. "You sound so certain of that, Severus. And you were first on the scene last night, weren't you? It's enough to make one think that you knew something about it."

"I _did _know something about it, and you of all people should know why."

"Which is why I thought you would use better judgement and be fashionably last instead of standing right next to me while the others filed in the door. Calpurnia mentioned it to me this morning, and Calpurnia Hooch generally doesn't give a toss for faculty gossip." She shook her head sadly. "He's using you again, Severus, the way he's always used you. _Both_ of you. As long as any shadow remains on you--"

"You wouldn't be any better against him now than I was then, Yvaine. This is much bigger than the both of us. Surely you understand."

"I understand perfectly." She sounded contemptuous, and when Harry got a glimpse of her face in profile she looked so full of wild, ferocious pride it made him feel that his whole life was useless, that he'd not yet cracked the cover of a book she knew by heart. "Mortal folks playing games, that's what I understand. Shifting each other like pieces on a chessboard, risk a rook to take a knight, give up a knight to take a queen. And in between the poor pawns like that child run about and die for you. You and your potions . . . Dumbledore and his midnight missions . . . and _him_ . . . you're all three the same, at the bone of you."

Snape cut her off short. "Watch what you say, Yvaine." 

"The Fair Folk do not need all the bits and bobs you mortal wizard sorts seem to fancy," she said. "None of us have ever had a need for spells or wands or potions. They're traps, they're toys, they're nothing but trickery. When I was a child we made fun of those ridiculous humans who studied for years to learn a tenth of what we were born knowing. When someone who was still coming to his full power flubbed a simple pishogue or glamourie, we'd laugh and say perhaps he needed a few more years at Hogwarts--or Durmstrang, or Bride's, or whatever school seemed the biggest joke at the time. Why should we care? Why should we care for magic written in books when we _are_ magic--when we are written of in books?"

"But, oh, we're not at all bitter," said Snape.

She seemed to come out of it at last. "Why do you think I took the Dark Arts position? I couldn't very well teach anything else. But you--you led me right in the thick of this mess. They warned me of you when I came here. I never should have trusted you."

"And I never should have trusted you, either. You promised me you wouldn't go meddling with anything I didn't care to share with you, and yet you did. Because it's in your _nature_." Snape towered over her, close enough to spit in her face, his voice growing deeper and louder as she shrank away. "If I had a Galleon for every time some bitch told me it was in her nature to do something, I could buy Gringotts!"

"_Lower your voice._" It was that tone again. She went on in a scalding whisper, "Besides, you told me yourself it wasn't time yet. If I'd been prepared I never would have sounded such an alarm. I could have called for you then and we might have--"

She paused in mid-word, her eyes flaring a pale red. Without hesitation she turned swiftly to face the exact spot where Harry crouched. 

"Harry Potter is in that corner behind the statue," she said calmly. "Just there."

This caught Harry so much with his guard down that he stupidly opened his mouth to protest that he wasn't. He checked himself at once, sticking the side of his hand in his mouth and chomping down. Her nostrils were flaring; she must have smelled whatever everybody else seemed to smell on him. 

"Doesn't surprise me at all, actually." Snape cast Evensong a look of such heavy significance that she bowed her head, looking ashamed. "You might as well come out, Potter. This concerns you too." 

In the long silence that followed, Harry sat perfectly still, hardly daring to breathe too loudly, and wondering if there remained even the remotest chance of slipping past the both of them, if not back to the dorm then at least to Dumbledore's office. Before he could steel himself to move, Evensong cleared her throat and solved the debate for him. "_Harry. Show yourself and come here."_

Against that command he had no control. His hands unfastened the clasp, and the cloak slid from his back as he stood and stepped out of the shadows.

__

"That was unnecessary, Yvaine."

"It worked, didn't it?" Evensong's face was still haggard, though not so much as before, yet with a scowl on her face she was unassailable, terrible, every inch something that should be feared. It didn't help that she was still obviously fuming at Snape. "Harry, didn't I ask you to leave us alone?"

"I didn't mean to run into you. I was on my way to Dumbledore's office."

"I'd hardly call curling up behind the statuary 'running into' people. _Accio_." The cloak flew from its heap on the floor to Snape's outstretched hand. "And you felt the need to wear a Cloak of Invisibility to visit the headmaster?"

"I know this all looks bad, but Dumbledore asked me to give over the cloak so he wouldn't have to worry about my sneaking out after hours with the ban on. I only put it on when I heard you two coming because I didn't want you to think I was spying on you again." Irony, that.

"I see. A great chain of coincidence."

"Hush," said Evensong. Her eyes had gone from grey to red again, and her look reminded Harry of the time when he'd tried to use sunlight through a magnifying glass to set fire to a heap of shredded paper. At last she said, "He's telling the truth. Or at least, he's telling so much of the truth as to make no difference to the rest. You might want to tell him now, Severus, while we're here together."

Snape looked as distressed as Snape could ever look. A double crease settled on his forehead as his black brows drew together. "The thing in the sub-cellar last night was a Death-Eater. One that escaped detection for quite some time, actually, and a former student at Hogwarts when your father was still alive. One who knew the ins and outs of this place as only a student could."

"Tell him all of it," Evensong insisted.

"He doesn't need to know all of it," growled Snape. His arms drew across his chest, and his body seemed to fold in on itself, untouchable, like a panther. He addressed Harry again. "I warned Dumbledore earlier this year that the time was coming when this . . . this student . . . would attempt an attack. At the time I thought I knew exactly when and where, so that I could be there when it took place and stop it. But instead, Dumbledore hired Professor Evensong to protect you, and afterwards I caught her alone, told her about the attack in detail, and made her promise secrecy. I didn't know that would . . . change things between us."

In the silence that followed Snape turned away from the both of them. Unable to stop herself, Evensong placed both hands on his shoulders, only to have him shift a step beyond her reach.

"May I ask a question?" said Harry. He made himself look at Evensong. "Are you a _baobhan sith_?"

"No!" she snapped, as if it were a dire insult. Her eyes went red again, so bright they looked like molten gold. "Whatever led you to think such a thing?"

"Apologise, Potter," said Snape without looking up. "Yvaine is Seelie. You've just done the equivalent of asking her if she's involved with the Dark Lord."

"I'm sorry, Professor. I only wanted to know."

He could see her forcing herself to compose herself before she spoke, and even then her words had a deadly bite. "No. I am _bean sidhe--_a servant of my King, and Seelie blood. No more, no less."

"Then what did I see in the greenhouse?"

Snape answered sharply. "A Repellment. Which I was unaware she had decided to perform. So I must thank you for one thing, Potter--I had suspected Yvaine had used a Repellment on me, but as I had no memory of the event I didn't want to accuse her. When you told me what you'd seen, I knew for certain."

"Look, are you going to start in with that again? It was for your own good. If you hadn't stopped me--"

"Yvaine, I have warned you a hundred times about interfering where you're not needed. If I had wanted--"

"Shut up!" Harry raked through his hair. The last thing he wanted was Snape and his hellcat girlfriend tearing into each other in front of him; he could only imagine how nasty things could get if both he and she started firing curses. "Jesus, you two are almost as bad as Ron and Hermione. Get over yourselves."

Evensong looked terribly discomfited. Snape only mumbled something below his breath.

"Harry," she said, "the point is, the situation is over now. Snape had told me this particular intruder would only make the attempt once. I was able to hold him off. You are safe. Anything you might be thinking of doing can only cause unimaginable damage, and could get one, both, or all three of us killed."

"I wasn't thinking of doing anything. If you two want to be left alone, by all means, have fun. I'm not interested in you, but I am interested in anything that involves Voldemort--"

Snape cleared his throat.

"Sorry, You-Know-Who, with him trying to kill me. Basically, everything you've just said means nothing to me because I have no idea what you're talking about." He might as well have been speaking Gaelic, for all the attention they paid him. At least if he'd been speaking Gaelic, Evensong would have noticed.

"Your friend Miss Granger has been walking around lately with the _Registrar of Teachers_," said Snape. "You may already suspect that something's amiss with the pattern of things here at Hogwarts. I am asking you not to try to figure anything else out. It won't help you to know, and it won't change anything."

"I don't know what you mean."

"Don't go stirring up the past. It's dead, it's done with. There's nothing you can do to change what's gone on before. And if I catch you trying to alter anything, so help me, I will do my best to make sure you are removed from this school and sent back to live with those wretched relations of yours for the rest of your life. And I'll see to it you are never taken back into the wizard world again--_ever_. You won't be able to get within six feet of a wand without the Ministry of Magic breathing down your neck."

"Are you two deaf or something over there? I haven't _done_ anything, I don't _intend_ on doing anything, and even if I was, I wouldn't do it now because something's out there trying to kill me--_again_."

Snape sighed, and the two of them stepped away, excluding Harry as completely as if he'd left the room hours before. "I told you, Yvaine. Useless. It's got to happen, because it hasalready happened. And it's got to come to him naturally or it might disrupt things more."

"I should have known better," she agreed. "I suppose he's going to have to go on with it. We'll have to make certain he doesn't close the flow. Can you handle that?"

"We'd have to let Albus in on it. No doubt he'd be able to think of something. I dread telling him though; he's going to wonder why I didn't say something sooner."

"Tell him the truth, then."

"See?" said Harry wildly. "You're doing it again. Why is it that every wizard in this school knows more about my business than _I_ do?"

Snape gave Harry a bemused, are-you-still-here look. Incredibly, he appeared to be smiling, although it could have been a trick of the light. "Because we're more equipped to handle it. Everything is inevitable, Potter, even the inevitable. You'll learn that directly."

He cupped his hand on Evensong's hollow cheek. "I'd best start working on the Transtempulary potion, then. You'll need it soon enough. I do wish you'd let me handle this, Yvaine." 

"You can't," she said. "The last thing you can risk is letting him see you. Time's no matter to me; I'd not be taking such a chance as you would be."

"You're stubborn."

"I'm stubborn, you're stubborn, the world is full of stubborn people. As my students would say, deal."

Over Evensong's shoulder, Snape's caught Harry's eye and gave a small, circular motion of the head that said, clear as the words, _turn around and face the wall a moment, won't you? _Harry smiled and shook his head no, but politely averted his eyes for the few moments needed for the two of them to say their goodbyes.

As Snape left, Evensong's eyes followed him. One thin, ghostly hand crept up to cover the spot where his hand had rested, as if she were holding in his warmth, and kept it there long after he was out of sight. She spoke as if in a trance. "Were we really behaving so badly, Potter?" 

"Afraid so."

She chuckled, more to herself than to him, and more to the absurdity of the circumstances than anything. "I do care for him, you know. I don't know what it is. Sometimes . . . he just seems to brush me the wrong way, do you understand how it is?"

"I have been acquainted with the condition, on occasion," he replied soberly.

She gave him a smile, a real one, warm and open. On her ravaged face it looked ghastly: a smiling skull, a corpse with teeth. The moment passed, and she became a professor yet again. "I really shouldn't be discussing this with you. You're still a boy. Give you a few years to fall in and out of love a few times and you'll understand what's going on."

As she spoke she gathered her hood in her hand, shaking it free of her braid, and covering herself with it until all that could be seen was her mouth and chin.

"What happened to your face, Professor?" Harry asked softly.

Evensong reached beneath the hood, touching her face with deep regret. "Nothing happened to my face. This is how I've always looked. The face I put on for the students is nothing but glamourie--faerie illusion, so that no one runs screaming in the other direction while I'm trying to teach a lesson. Last night in the sub-cellar . . . . the friendly neighbourhood assassin struck me with a spell, thinking he could kill me." 

She gave a little chuckle, as if these memories were richly amusing, but her stance was withdrawn and unfeeling. "He didn't know he what he was dealing with, so he aimed the spell at my glamourie. It missed me entirely but dispelled the charm. Moonlight will heal it, but the moon is waning just now, and I'll have to wait another two weeks to look normal again." Her voice belied her tiny smile. "But Severus doesn't seem to mind me so, and he's the only one I'm concerned about. I am sorry, though, Harry. About the Repellment. If I'd known you were so near . . . ."

"I've had worse." After facing down Voldemort, lesser injuries took on a new perceptive. "I'm sorry I thought you were a _baobhan sith_. I didn't know it would hurt you."

"If I'd seen what you'd seen, and not knowing, I'd have thought the same of me," she said. "But that's water under the bridge. I can't believe a man would be so stubborn about such a little thing. I see it in his eyes, Harry. The power leeches from him, steals his sleep. And yours too, I would imagine. You two are very much alike, in some ways."

Which, if true, was the worst insult he'd ever been paid, but he could not say such a thing to her. Watching them together had softened him to Snape.

"Why Snape? Why of all people Snape?"

She said nothing for a time, for so long in fact that Harry was unsure she'd heard him at all. When she spoke, the words came slowly. "'When he shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars, and he will make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with the night, and pay no worship to the garish sun.'"

She swirled away, a dervish in white, and turned the corner before Harry could move from the spot. By the time he thought to follow, she had disappeared 

* * *

Hermione was in the Commons when he returned from delivering the cloak--thank God, because without it he had no way of sneaking into the girls' dorm to fetch her. Another one of those huge unwieldy books of Gaelic made a dent in her lap; near her right hand sat a quill, inkpot, and a scroll half-covered with vocabulary words that did not involve playing tennis.

"Any word on the sub-cellar?" he asked.

"Nobody was much up for the cute act. I thought Evensong was my best bet, but she was in such a foul temper this morning that I could only assume she was having the painters in. I didn't dare get with arms' reach of her to ask. I got a little out of Hagrid, though. He said that whoever it was had been driven back the way he had come by the time he and the other teachers got there. And then he told me he probably shouldn't have told me that."

"So whatever it was is still on the loose?" She nodded. "Possibly still in Hogwarts?" She nodded again, more slowly. "And people are still letting me wander around loose? Does everyone here just _want_ me dead?"

"You being dead would save loads on their security costs. Dementors one year, a _baobhan sith _the next--it adds up. If electricity worked here they could just install motion detectors."

"She's not a _baobhan sith_. Please don't ask for the whole story; I'm too worn-out to be coherent." He dropped into a chair and rubbed his temples. What Snape had told him still echoed in his head. Something was amiss in Hogwarts . . . something in the past that couldn't--_shouldn't_--be altered. Hermione managed to unload her book from her lap and _thunk_ed it onto the desk with a groan of relief. 

He looked up. "Hermione--that book from the library. The one with all the teacher's records."

"The _Registrar of Teachers_? What about it?"

"Does it have anything about student enrolment? Who was here when, when they graduated, anything like that?"

"No, but I know where that one is. I can get it for you easily when the library reopens."

Harry nodded slowly. Already he was thinking that perhaps he couldn't be bothered to wait for the library to finish de-mothing. "Another question. How good are you at Arithmancy?"

"Top of the class." A touch of the old Hermione pride came back.

"Good. Maybe you can answer me this." He leaned in close to her. "How could Snape have been teaching here sixty years _when he was a student in the same year as my parents?_"

Situation not withstanding, Harry got a good bit of grim satisfaction from the look on Hermione's face just then. For once in her life, she didn't have a single thing to say.


	9. The Yule Ball

__

Author's Note: I wasn't going to post this chapter, as it adds nothing to the story but a few hints and some character development, but I figured hey! It's Christmas: time for the Hogwarts Yule Ball. This chapter is completely gratuitous, but fun, and may be safely skipped over in favour of the following, more interesting one, wherein the narrative thread is taken up once more. 

This chapter is dedicated to the snide person (who for their own safety shall remain anonymous) who pointed out that in Chapter 3 the "Leaky Cauldron" was the pub in Diagon Alley, while the "Hog's Head" was the pub in Hogsmeade. Rats. And just when I thought I was pulling something over on you, too. Congratulations, sir! You are, as Ron so aptly put it, a total geek.

========

NINE

Ron threw himself at the seat across the lunch table. He was in a panic, his red hair standing up in spikes, and the whites showing all around his eyes. "Harry, you've got to help me, I've just done something awful."

"Wait." Harry finished chewing his bite of sandwich and swallowed, while holding up a hand for patience. "First, swear to me that your next sentence does not contain the names of any two professors who may or may not be sleeping with each other."

"It doesn't."

"Fire away."

"I took your advice."

"What advice?" He tried to remember any advice he'd ever given Ron, other than the one about not sneaking crib sheets to Trewlaney's class because she spotted them a day in advance. Then he remembered. "Hermione?"

"Yes." He looked like a fox with the hounds ready to burst into the lunch hall at any second. "I told her what you said I should tell her, and she said if I was so damn fond of her why didn't I invite her to the Yule Ball and I did and she said yes."

"Good for you, then."

Ron took two fistfuls of Harry's robe and lugged him brutally away from his lunch. "_Not_ good for me! You've got to get me out of it! I just overheard Richard Parker saying how _he_ was thinking of asking her, and I thought, 'Rich Parker, he's Head Boy, she'll drop me in a second.' What should I do? I've already asked what colour she's wearing and everything."

Harry's elbow was now planted firmly in a turkey sandwich, with mayonnaise soaking through his sleeve. He pried off Ron's clutching fingers, straightened his own uniform as best he could, and began cleaning himself up as Ron, dead-white, crumpled into a chair and sat there winded and wide-eyed, swaying ever so slightly and looking as if he'd been hit over the back of the head.

"Good grief, it's only a dance, Weasley. You've been to school dances before."

"Not with her I haven't. Besides . . . ." Ron trailed off, which was totally unlike Ron, whose mouth and brain had a direct link with no perceptible means of content editing. "Besides, I figured you were going to ask her, anyway."

Well, there was _that_ card on the table. 

"Ron, think about it. Hermione and me? A two-hour train ride twice a year with no way to escape Granger's yammering is like a season in hell. You can't honestly think I have any interest in her." As he said it, a very small knife twisted inside him. It wasn't as true as he would have liked it to be. "One date isn't going to kill either of you. It might actually drag Hermione away from her long unrequited love affair with the library."

"Are you sure? Because if you really want to ask her I'm sure I could back out. I'll go tell her now. Or you can tell her. Tell her I'm planning on having a bout of intestinal flu that night and I asked you to take her instead."

"Jesus." He shoved lunch out the way and put his head on the table. "I came to this school to learn to be a _wizard_, not an agony-aunt!" 

This remark well past shrill enough to make Ravenclaws at the adjoining table speculate, loudly, on whether Potter had finally cracked under the stress.

"Are you going to finish that?"

Without looking, he shoved his plate at Ron. "You can eat around the elbow-print." His head came up again. "I am not taking Hermione to this dance. I have no intentions toward her, honourable or dishonourable or otherwise. I am sick of messing with other people's romantic lives and would much rather work on starting one of my own, so will you please just eat my lunch and go to the Ball and shut up about it, already?"

Ron picked up half the sandwich, reflecting on it the way Socrates might have contemplated the hemlock "Why did she have to get taller than me? I'm going to look like an idiot, us dancing with me resting my chin in her cleavage."

Harry firmly suppressed his smile, but one shrewd black eyebrow crooked above the edge of his glasses. "Some people would consider that a really good date, Ron."

"Don't you understand? It's _Hermione_. Hermione can't have cleavage. Hermione isn't even supposed to _be_ a girl." 

This was also quite loud. The Ravenclaws started jabbering again. The madness must be spreading; Weasley had it now.

"Well, I should hope she's a girl, if you're asking her out. _I_ certainly won't dance with you."

"But . . . but you'll be there, right?" Ron looked up, trembling in terror. "I mean, if something unforeseen happens and I make an ass of myself . . . you'll be there, won't you Harry?"

It was times like this when Harry had the feeling that he and Ron had been separated at birth. He poured a glass of sparkling grape juice, slid it over to Ron, and smiled. "I'll be there. Even if I have to go stag." 

Two hours later he got the same treatment, in reverse, from Hermione.

"Why the hell did you tell Ron Weasley to ask me to the Yule Ball?" She sat down at her desk and glared at Harry as if she'd like nothing more than to spare Voldemort the trouble of butchering Potter in some new and spectacular manner.

"I didn't."

"Well, he did, and I said yes, and now I have to go. Stupid school dances. Who comes up with these things, anyway? It's a waste of good tuition money, not to mention what I'll have to spend getting new dress robes since last year's are six inches too short and I look like a bloody stork in them."

"Yeah, I was going to talk to you about that. If you two end up dancing, could you . . . I don't know . . . could you maybe bend your knees a little?"

Oblivious to Harry, she raced on, words tripping over each other on their way out. High on her cheeks two tiny pink balls of colour burned. "Richard Parker asked me to the Ball not twenty minutes after I'd already said yes to Ron. Head Boy, and I had to turn him down. Harry Potter, this is your entire fault. As of this moment, we are no longer friends. As a matter of fact, I'm making it effective retroactively. We have _never_ been friends." 

Hermione bent her head to her knees and put her hands over her face. Harry stood over her, thumbs tucked into his pockets, a silly grin on his face.

"What colour are you wearing?" Harry asked at last.

Hermione grieved from behind her hands. "Wine-red."

* * *

It was Thursday, two days after the attack in the sub-cellar, one day before the Yule Ball, and the air outside tasted of snow. Bundled in his winter cloak and scarf, Harry wandered in from the courtyard to the First Hall stairs, wondering how he was supposed to get his priorities in order at a time like this. He needed a date for the Yule Ball. He was about to owe the brothers Weasley more money than he currently possessed. There was something off-beam with what Snape had told him the hallway, not to mention the conversation afterwards: inexplicable prattle about what had to come to him naturally, and a former student--no, that doesn't cover too much ground; let's say, every wizard in England?--who'd gone undetected as a Death Eater. The first name that came to mind was Peter Pettigrew. It was a possibility, with only one flaw that Harry could see: there was no reason for Snape to be so foreboding about someone that Potter knew.

He passed down Second Hall, grunting a curt hullo to the portrait of eight merry maids a-Maying, and hunching his shoulders as they crowded the front edge of the frame to blow him kisses and wave their scarves as he hustled beneath. Beyond them lay the stairs going up to Third Hall and the professors' wing, which he intended to walk through as quickly as possible on his way to Fourth. 

On with the list. Last year's dress robes were too small under the armpits. The new ones, arriving tonight by express owl, would probably be hideous. Ron would no doubt make Harry mental by tomorrow evening. And Voldemort was trying to kill him, which didn't trouble him nearly as much as it should have done since Voldemort had been trying to kill him since he was an infant and all the other problems had come about recently. 

Climbing up to Third Hall and the back stairs to Gryffindor, trying to avoid the brothers Weasley in case they decided to rough him up about the bet (Fred and George were not above doing this, nor would they balk at hiring other people to do it for them), Harry paused, one hand on the stair rail, as a voice so sweet it sent shivers up his spine floated down the hall.

_"The Christmas goose is in the pot . . . the Christmas psalms are read . . . I'll spend my day the lover's way . . . unwrapping all my gifts in bed . . . ." _Quiet as a shadow, Evensong drifted past the mouth of the stairs, heading toward the teachers' lodgings. "_The Yu-le log is on the fire . . . ."_

Vertigo swept over him, as if he'd misjudged his step. Instinctively he grasped the rail while his free hand to his forehead, over the scar, and felt nothing. Not a scar-feeling. The feeling of the black spot, the memory of his mother's singing, distant now as the sound of snow outside. 

"Pretty, don't you agree?" There was no warmth to the words. Snape had come up behind him without so much as disturbing the air. His hands were held behind his back, and a trace of fresh snow clung to the shoulders of his black wool cloak.

Harry nodded, fingers still pressed to his scar. "Makes me dizzy, though."

"Try pinching your nose and exhaling, hard. It helps." He reminded Harry of the black bishop in Ron's chess set. Or one of the ravens that lived on the lawn of the haunted chapel, and the way they tilted their heads when they spotted something edible or otherwise attractive. "Has your memory come back at all, Potter?"

"No, sir. It comes in bits and pieces."

"Neither has mine. I've told her I want the last effects of the Repellment removed as soon as possible. You might want to do the same."

"Is she safe?"

"She's as safe as her kind ever is. Which isn't saying much for them." He sounded as if he wished it were otherwise. His hawk's eyes followed the sound of her voice, even though she had long disappeared from view, as if he could perceive her passage through stone. "The Faerie are liars. It's a point of pride for them."

"You didn't trust her enough to let her do the Repellment to begin with, but you'll let her take off the effects."

"It wasn't a matter of not trusting. I know what she's capable of doing. It was a matter of my specifically denying her permission to perform a very intimate and unnerving form of healing." 

"In the Muggle world, they call it 'invading your personal space', sir."

"For once, I actually agree with a Muggle." A low mutter came from the floor. "Damn, here it goes." 

Both of them held very still as the stairs beneath them rumbled, then shifted to the left, leaving the top step hanging over a six storey drop to the ground floor. Snape growled and kicked the post. "I rather needed to get to my room."

Harry took advantage of the pause. "Sir, was the thing in the sub-cellar Peter Pettigrew?" 

"If I said yes, would it make any difference?"

"Not really, sir. But the devil you know is better--"

Snape stopped him. "Spare me your platitudes. It wasn't Pettigrew. And I'll thank you to stop pressing the subject, as it really is none of your concern."

"Begging your pardon, sir. But since both you and Evensong seem to think I'm a deaf-mute, I'll remind you that I was standing on the hem of your robes while you were discussing the matter. I can put two and two together. Former student, and a Death Eater. Sounds like Pettigrew to me. Or would you rather I try to find out for myself? Just what is it I'm not supposed to know, so I can avoid it if I see it?"

"I think," said Snape, "you may be taking whatever information you've weaselled out of me a bit too lightly."

"The way she did, huh?"

The stairs began to grind their way back to meet Fourth Hall. When the top step became flush with the walkway, Snape started up again, pausing on the step above Potter to deliver a final, grim note.

"Whatever happens, I am still your professor. So mind what you say to me. Ten points from Gryffindor, Potter." 

He brushed past him, up the stairs after Evensong.

"Happy Christmas to you, too," Harry murmured when Snape had gone. When he was certain the professor was far enough down the passage, he added viciously, "Prick."

* * *

He rapped a dozen times as fast and loud as he could on Hermione's door. India White opened up, said quickly, "She still says she's retroactively not your friend," and tried to shut it back. Fortunately Harry was carrying _The Giant Guide to Wee Folks_ and dropped it on the sill in time to prevent the door closing. While India struggled to unwedge the tome, Harry leaned through the gap, spotted Hermione sitting on her bed, and tossed a box in her lap. "From Ron," he said, before India finally kicked the book out of the way. He missed getting his hand crushed by half a second.

He went back to Ron, who sat chewing his thumbnail in the Commons, and clicked his heels together before snapping a salute. "Corsage delivered."

Ron grinned. "Mission accomplished."

* * *

Harry came down the boys' stairs, dressed in simple black dress robes trimmed in tiny electric-green lizards. Ron and Hermione waited for him at the portal hole. Hermione's new robes were crushed crimson velvet, lush and thick, with gold Gryffindor lions around the hem. It was cut with a slight train that might have been an attempt by Madame Malkin to conceal Hermione's ankles. Ron looked uncomfortable, overdressed, and slightly over-washed, his white face shiny with soap. It might have been the light but he seemed to have scrubbed off some freckles. Next to Hermione's robes, his hair looked orange. Of all the boys in Hogwarts who clashed their girl's flowers with her robes, only Weasley could manage to clash with his whole date. 

"Are you two kids ready?" Harry asked, jumping the last two steps. Now that he was on the main floor with them, Hermione _was_ taller than Ron, a lot taller. The heavy vertical folds of her robes only accentuated it. 

"I'm nearly a year older than you, Harry Potter," Hermione replied primly.

"Fine, then, you be chaperone. I'll be in my room."

Ron spoke through his teeth, as if his face was on too tight. "May we please go down, before I overheat in all this stupid velvet?"

"Nonsense. You look very nice, Ron," she said with all sincerity. Ron's robes plain velvet and a darker shade of red than Hermione's. It did nothing for his hair, but they matched, and Hermione was satisfied. Colour-coordination was an obsessive thing for girls. "So do you, Harry," she added generously, before frowning and reaching out to rub his collar. "Lizards?"

"I like lizards. What's that on your robes, then, circus elephants?"

Hermione fiddled with Ron's robes, brushing a touch of dust from his sleeve, then turned on Harry, trying to slick down his hair. Harry swatted her hands. "Do you want to go to a dance, or do you want to groom us?"

"Yes." She ran one arm under Ron's, the other under Harry's. "Are we ready, then?"

Hermione dragged them through the portal hole and down the passage. The boys got to like it once they managed to get in step. About halfway down the Fourth Hall stairs Hermione and Harry broke into singing "Hey Big Spender" at the top of their lungs, with Ron shamming the parts he didn't know. 

Evensong and Sir Nicholas came up the passage, side by side, reminiscing as they approached the Great Hall. Her hood was still half over her face, and her hand draped lightly just above Sir Nicholas's diaphanous ruffled sleeve. Nick seemed particularly pompous about the whole affair, his chin held as high as he could manage without his head toppling over. 

"Does this mean she's come to the Ball with Nearly Headless Nick instead of Snape?" whispered Harry. "Talk about bitter pills. Imagine getting thrown over for a dead guy."

"He's safe, at least," said Ron. "He's already dead."

When Sir Nicholas walked through the main doors, Evensong absentmindedly trailed after him. Hermione tugged Ron's sleeve. "She does this all the time. Forgets to be corporeal. Watch."

Evensong floated back through the door. She opened it, stepped through, then shut it behind her again. It was so absurd that the three of them started laughing, and things started to feel normal again. 

"Which one of us gets to hold the door for the lady?" asked Harry.

"That would be you, third-wheel."

"She's your date. You're supposed to be chivalrous."

"I thought we agreed that you were my valet. You hold doors, shine shoes, deliver flowers, and do all-around lackey work."

While they stood there arguing, Hermione slipped her arm out of Ron's, crossed the hall, and held open the door. Grim but smiling, she beckoned them inside. The two boys obligingly linked arms and walked in together, with Hermione curtseying as they passed. Hermione wriggled her way between them once inside, and Harry took his place, trailing behind like a butler.

Inside, the Great Hall was extravagant, outshining the decorations from two years before. Among the floating candles sparkled crystal prisms in the shape of stars, revolving slowly, sending out winks of green and orange, red and blue. A small stage had been set up to one side of the head table--near Professor Luddivon, who wouldn't be bothered by the noise--and three pale men who made Evensong look positively tan by comparison were unloading cellos. Empty tables laid out in goldware and china waited in anticipation of the feast, but most overwhelming was the tree--a mountain fir that nearly brushed the expanse of starry sky above.

"Sprout grew it," Hermione said with pride as they gawked. She sounded as if she'd had a hand in it herself. "It's not really that big--she just put an Enlargement spell on it for the Ball. It's still alive, too. She's got it to root in the floor somehow."

"And the sky's not real, the candles are under a Levitation Charm, and the chap in the Father Christmas costume is actually Dumbledore," concluded Ron. "Can you just not dissect things for one night, Hermione?"

She turned pink. "It is lovely, though," she admitted, leaning her head on Ron's shoulder to admire the rainbow stars. Ron took a quick, surprised look from the round, dark head on his shoulder to Harry. Harry gave him a thumbs-up. 

Lavender Brown waved. "How'd you get two dates, Hermione?" Admiration ensued, replete with shrill squeals over Hermione's fabulous dress versus Lavender's luxuriant red hair bound in a net of crystal beads, while their respective dates--and Harry--lined against the wall, waiting for the fever to pass.

Harry was watching the head table. The teachers had arrived well in advance to make the final preparations, and were only just settling down now, enjoying the milling hum on the floor. It was always amazed Harry to see how much of their professional personas they shed on occasions like these. McGonagall, alternating between stern and flustered and flattered as Professor Umlaut presented her with a gift . . . Dumbledore, who probably didn't intend to look as much like Father Christmas as he did in his bright scarlet robes and fur-trimmed cloak. Hagrid had not yet arrived, but there was a chance he was somewhere trying to sober up--he had been known to start celebrating a few hours before everyone else. 

And at the end of the table, Snape. Wearing black, of course. Beside him, Evensong strove to shame him into having a good time.

"We were wrong." He focused Ron's attention on the two teachers. "Evensong's given up the ghost." 

Hermione saw them and clucked her tongue. "As you've just reminded me, gentlemen, this is a dance. Let's not discuss business tonight."

"This is business?" said Harry, surprised.

"It wasn't our business until Harry 'Hardy Boy' Potter decided to make it our business."

"With Nancy Drew Granger at my side all the way."

Ron looked baffled. Hermione squeezed his shoulder. "Muggle stuff. I'll tell you about it later." Almost as an afterthought, she tucked her hand in his and led him away to talk to her roommate India, who was here with the very stunned looking young man she'd abducted from the house Quidditch team.

Fred and George turned up late. To add to the confusion, they had dressed identically and were escorting the Patel twins. Over the course of the evening Padma and Parvati were subjected to much swapping: both Weasleys cutting in each other's dances so many times the girls ended up rather dazed. By the end of the night not only would they not know which Weasley was taking them back to their dorm but would probably have forgotten which brother they started off with. Poor Padma; this was her second Ball with a Weasley, and it looked as if it might be her last. 

Ron and Hermione had drawn off to a pair of chairs and were chatting amiably. At the head table, it looked as if Evensong were trying to persuade Snape to dance. Smiling, Harry started for a glass of punch. 

Ron appeared out of nowhere and intercepted him. "Uh, I don't think you'd better do that, Potter. I just saw Fred slip something into the bowl."

He took a mug of warm butterbeer instead. There was definitely something floating in the peachy depths of the punch. "Ron, there's something pink on your neck. It almost matches Hermione's lipstick."

"It's a spot, okay? It's the same spot I've been complaining about all week, Potter, so don't start!" 

Harry grinned. This must be what people meant when they talked about living vicariously. It wasn't half bad. "Have you asked her to dance yet?"

Ron rubbed his neck. "Um, no. Not yet. The floor's been rather crowded."

"Go on. One dance. This could be the last dance of your life at Hogwarts. You want to look back when you're Dumbledore's age and say you never got one clear shot to snog Granger on the dance floor?"

"Do you have to use the word snog?"

The music changed just then to a waltz. The floating candles dimmed. All the students groaned at the sudden onslaught of teacher-music; there was a general exodus from the centre of the room. 

Harry clapped Ron on the back and spoke in his best pre-game Quidditch pep-talk voice. "That's a sign from heaven, mate. Go to." 

He waited until he was certain Ron was at least headed in Hermione's general direction, then went back to watching. Only a few of the top forms were on the floor now, the cello's slow vibration tingling eerily down the back of Harry's neck. For a moment, the black spot threatened everything; blood rushed to his head. Quickly he took a vacated chair, cradling his head in his hands.

One look at the dance floor changed everything; the black feeling swept away like pages on the wind. Ron had finally asked her.

There they were, in each other's arms on the floor, revolving very slowly, Ron staring down into Hermione's face as if gazing on a total stranger. Harry's heart nearly burst. _Good God, look at that. First time since they met on the Hogwarts Express those two aren't ripping each other to shreds. Who knew all it take was getting a dress on Hermione and threatening Ron's life to accomplish all that? _Something was wrong though; why did Ron have to look _down_ on Hermione?

When he realised what it was, it struck him as the funniest, most heartbreaking thing he'd ever seen. Foolish tears welled up. He blinked them away. Beneath the full folds of her heavy velvet skirt, noticeable only to one who was looking for it, Hermione Granger danced gracefully on half-bended knees.

A half-hour later, the punchbowl was swimming in tadpoles. The Patel twins looked very dizzy indeed. Evensong had given up trying to get Snape on the floor, and Harry allowed Hermione and Ron to wander off somewhere. With his chair leaned back against the wall, Harry pondered to himself the essential weirdness of his life. Born a wizard, raised by the most Muggly Muggles, possibly the most famous student in Hogwarts--and the best dance of his life was the one he had sat out.

"Jesus H. Christ on pancakes!" George suddenly shouted. "Hagrid's shaved his beard!"

Everybody turned in horror as the enormous Professor ducked slightly under the doorframe. He was dressed in his Christmas best, a midnight black robe covered in glittery stars, with his brown oilskin duster thrown over the top. Harry was on his feet, gaping along with all the students, half the faculty, and six of the twelve resident ghosts. Ever since he'd met Hagrid, half his face had been overgrown by a chest-length woolly black beard . . . and he'd finally shaved it off. After the shock wore off, he sat back down. What mandate of God himself could possible persuade Hagrid to the barber's?

In about three seconds the question was answered for everyone. Hagrid extended him arm, and a second, equally enormous creature dipped under the doorframe. Her skin was rich, glowing olive, oil-black hair skimmed back from her face and woven into some fabulous concoction on the nape of her neck. A blush set off her noble cheekbones as Hagrid proudly lead her to the head table.

A smile spread over Harry's face; he couldn't stop it. He mouthed the woman's name: _Madame Maxime._

One of the Weasley twins started clapping, slowly, followed by his brother. The people around them soon caught up. By the time Hagrid and Maxime reached the head table even the teachers were on their feet applauding, some of the younger ones pounding their feet against the floor as well, and the thunder was deafening. A shout--it could only have been Ron--from the back of the Hall: "_Yeah, Hagrid!"_

__

This was the final straw. If Hagrid could find a woman, if Ron could . . . hell, if _Snape_ could, then Harry obviously just wasn't trying hard enough.

* * *

Before they went to bed Ron cornered Harry in the Common Room. He pulled down the collar of his velvet robe and pointed. "See that? _That_, my friend, is lipstick." 


	10. Unravelling the System

TEN

The cosy Yule Ball spirit didn't last much beyond final bell of the following afternoon. Hermione and Ron were wrangling the moment Harry sat down at the dinner table with them.

"Even Moaning Myrtle knows, which means that Peeves will know come dawn tomorrow and the rest of the spooks come noon! Everybody!" Hermione shouted. "How could you possibly tell everybody in this school within twelve hours?"

"I didn't tell anybody. The only person I even mentioned it to was Harry and . . . ." A stunned look crossed Ron's face. He sank deeper into his chair. "And George."

"_You told your stinking brother?_" she screamed. 

A authoritarian glare from McGonagall at the head table made her drop her next statement to a sinister hiss. "Next time why don't you just send word to Rita Skeeter? She'll love it. It'll probably make the banner page. 'Hermione Granger and Total Turd Implicated in Mistletoe Tryst'!" Hermione wheeled on Harry just as he sat down. "And _you_--"

"Don't bring me into this. I'm done playing Miss Lonelyhearts for you two. And I've got a plan."

"Your _last_ plan put me in a dark corner of the Main Hall with your best friend and his roaming hands!"

"Don't believe her, Harry. I never laid a finger on her for fear of drawing back a stump!" Furious, he snatched up his dinner plate and swapped seats, silverware clattering as he thumped down beside Harry. His face brightened as he got a good sniff. "Hey! You don't smell like cinnamon anymore."

"Evensong fixed me up. Hermione, please, listen. I think I've figured it out. At the start of third year you had a Time-Turner so that you could take two classes at the same time. Do you think Snape has gotten hold of one?"

The idea of this was enough to quiet her. Slowly she turned the idea over in her mind, considered the details, then rejected it. "For one thing, they're very dangerous. You've got to make sure you know about paradoxes and temporal stability and all kinds of things before you use can one. The Ministry of Magic doesn't just hand them out to any half-cocked wizard off the street."

"But they let you have one," Harry persisted. 

Hermione went murderous. 

"That didn't come out right. Please don't kill me. What I meant was, they gave one to a student--"

"After McGonagall signed hundreds of forms for it!"

"--Why wouldn't they give one to a professor? They'd surely be able to trust him."

Hermione calmed down enough to find her normal business-like composure. "Are you suggesting that Snape used a Time-Turner to go back sixty years? Considering that you have to turn it over once to go back an hour, that doesn't seem likely. He'd have to turn it over five hundred twenty-five thousand, six hundred times, not counting Leap Years. It's bound to do some kind of damage, going back that far."

"What's scary is she just did that math in her head," said Ron.

"That's not even starting to consider paradox. Say he did go back sixty years, he'd eventually run into himself as a student."

"Is that bad?" Harry asked.

"That's really bad. That's called temporal paradox. One of those destroy-the-whole-world kinds of things." She took a sip of water.

"Would it close the flow?"

Hermione's eyes went grave over the rim of her glass. She set it down carefully. "Yes. Yes, it most certainly would. Now tell me how you knew about that."

"Evensong said it. She said that she and Snape had to be very careful not to close the flow. What does that mean?"

"That's the thing that McGonagall warned me about. It's also one of the reasons I decided against taking double classes again; I forgot and nearly ran into myself in the girl's toilet between classes. It's a loop in time that happens in a really big temporal paradox. That section in time gets closed off from the flow of history, forever, and starts skipping and replaying itself again and again, like a scratch on a CD."

"That's not like a BBC, is it?" asked Ron sceptically.

"For the sake of explaining, I'm going to say yes. It's really more like a crack in a window. Eventually as time goes on, the damage gets worse, and the crack starts spreading in both directions throughout time. Something like what we did, going back a few hours to break Sirius out of the tower--that wouldn't be much of a paradox, because a few hours don't mean much in the course of all history. Sixty years, though . . . it's a really bad idea. Snape would have to be up to something huge to even consider it."

"How about Dumbledore, could he do it?"

"I don't doubt but he could. He didn't just win that Order of Merlin, First Class, in a Gandalf look-alike contest, Harry. It's only awarded to those who've mastered the flow of time--like Merlin living backwards through history. Brr." She shivered. "Our Headmaster's a really scary man, if you look at him the right way."

"Fine then. So my theory's scrapped." Harry drew them both into a huddle. "But this is my other idea. Tonight, we're going to break into the library."

"Again?" Ron sounded agonised.

"I want that book of student enrolments, and anything else I can find. All this ties together somehow with the thing in the sub-cellar, and if we can figure that out--"

"Then we'll know what Snape is up to." Ron sighed. "Harry, if you'd known in advance that following Snape to the greenhouse would be this much trouble, would you still have done it?"

"Too late to fix it now." 

Dinner hour was ending. The three of them moved in a tight knot out of the room. Sunset slanted through the hall windows, and the ban against being caught in the halls was rigidly in place. Students scattered quickly in pairs and small groups down the halls, hurrying to their rooms. The three of them walked more slowly, allowing themselves to be left behind. Hermione mulled over the new slant in the situation.

"We'll have to sneak out late, after midnight when the Fat Lady falls asleep," said Hermione at last. "Both of you wear your student robes and something black under them. We can take the back staircase through the teacher's wing. There are never any lights on in that hall. If we're quiet, we can make it down without being spotted."

"This would be so much easier if I still had my cloak," Harry grumbled.

"Like you say, it can't be fixed," said Ron. "Don't worry. We've sneaked out of the dorm without an Invisibility Cloak before; we can do it again." 

Hermione went on. "Ron, you can stand as lookout. Stick close to the front passage and send up a flare if anything's coming. No, not a _real_ flare. It's a metaphor. It's . . . oh, just forget it. I'll get the student enrolment book. It may take a while; there are a lot of books on that shelf that attack if they're jarred. Harry, go to the Yearbook Shelf and find the one from the year Snape would have graduated."

"1972? That was Mum and Dad's final year."

"Yes. It's recent, so it should be close to the bottom. I really think that you may be right about this one, Harry. Too many things at once. Snape is really up to something this time." She sounded excited about the prospect. Harry only wished he could feel the same.

"Shall we have a rousing battle cry?" asked Ron.

Harry held up his right fist. The other two did likewise. They cracked their knuckles together in the centre of their circle, then latched hands and squeezed. Whistling in the dark, but in Hogwarts, any kind of magic was the best kind.

"What are we doing?" said Harry.

"We don't know!"

"When will we do it?"

_"Now!"_

* * *

Breaking and entering had gone beyond a stomach-clenching, panic-fuelled necessity. During third year it turned to a giddy thrill, and by their fourth year Harry grew to almost enjoy it, but these days it had dulled into a routine, unconsidered way of life, like brushing one's teeth in the morning. Hermione sprang the lock. After all this time, the library was still considered less worthy of protection than say, the kitchens or the Prefects' bathroom, despite the fact that none of the three of them had ever had justification to forcibly enter either of those. One would think that by now someone should have suspected something was going on with the library, but the locked door gave as easily as ever. Ron positioned himself inside the door as Hermione and Harry padded deep among the books. 

The first stop was the Yearbook Shelf. Harry took one look and turned pale.

"God, there's a million of these." He bent to the floor, looking closer at the bottommost row. "And they're not in any kind of sequence. Look, this is 1522 here near the floor. What kind of pictures could possibly be in a yearbook from 1522?" 

"Just take a look through while I get the other book. Look for the late '60s, or anything after 1941; that's the year he started teaching."

"Hermione, does the phrase _needle in a haystack_ hold any meaning for you?"

Hermione ran her fingers along the flush spines of the middle shelf, biting her lower lip. "1830, 1522, 1666. . . hmm, really slim volume, that . . . well, there's bound to be _some_ kind of order. If you can't find anything, then don't worry about it. All we really need is the enrolments."

She hurried to the back, her dark robes soon disappearing between two narrow towering columns of books. 

The Yearbooks went back to the 1100s, row upon crammed row of them--thousands, all with a layer of velvety dust across their tops. All were bound in a uniform dirty-brown leather that the eye skimmed over without remark, and the dates on the spines were printed in a lacklustre shade of grey which would have barely readable even if the library lamps had been lit. The shelves bowed under the weight. Despite Hermione's insistence, there was no kind of pattern--the Steam Age next to the Dark Ages, the whole Victorian era strewn throughout four or five rows--and Harry stared up at them, overcome by the generations of students who must have gone through this school not knowing that their descendents would be thwarted by Hogwarts' lack of a comprehensible filing system. 

The only question now was whether he should start at the top and work his way down, or start at the bottom and work his way up. Since both plans were equally likely to produce results, he started in the middle, directly at eye-level, and drew up a chair in case he had to climb later.

By the kind of fortuitous chance known only to students who've tried to find any specific book in a open-stack system, he discovered _Hogwarts Review: 1972_ at the very end of the third row. He had to wiggle it free like a tooth. Settling down at a table, he flipped through the section of top forms while attempting to keep an ear out for Ron and an eye for Hermione. 

Cheery previous graduates in their old-fashioned pointed caps waved at him from the pages. No James Potter was pictured or even mentioned--not even on the House Quidditch team, which Harry had thought the best place to find him. No Lily Evans, either, although he couldn't remember clearly if his mother had been the same age or a year younger than his father; he reminded himself to check the book for 1973, or even '74, if he could find them. And not a word about Severus Snape on the graduate pages. Maybe Snape had never graduated--interesting information, if true, but not useful. Frantically he scanned for dates--any date at all--and couldn't find a one. It was almost as bad as the old nightmare about taking Professor Binn's final exam and finding himself with his mind a total blank, unable to remember a single thing, and stuck with a quill that didn't work. 

Maybe he needed to try an earlier year--1971 might be near enough. He put down the first volume and scanned the shelves for the next, hoping dumb luck would find him again. 

Either he'd been too nervous to notice before or it hadn't been that way when he started, but the spine of one book stuck out two inches from its brothers. Dotting the smooth line of the shelf were several others, half a dozen all told, which seemed to have been pulled partway out. He climbed on his chair and leaned to take one. In his hands it fell open to the title page.

_Hogwarts Review: 1972._

A single metallic click as loud as a gunshot made Harry jump to the library floor, then a prolonged, excruciating rumble came to life within the wall itself. Harry backed away, fearing that the shelf might disgorge all its volumes at once, glancing around helplessly for Hermione. 

Gears ground as the whole heavy shelf slid sideways to expose a dark gap. 

Hermione's voice came back to him. _I never really thought about it . . . unused student dorms, that whole suite behind the Hogwarts Alumni Memorial Yearbook Shelf in the library . . ._

He thought of calling to her now, but couldn't bring himself to do it.Instead he set the two books on top of a table. He reached into his school robes for the Surreptitious Glowing Wand the brothers Weasleys had given him, giving it three sharp raps against his palm as the instructions said. A weak sputter of sparks gasped out of the tip, and the whole wand began to shine a feeble watery-tea colour that illuminated a sphere about as large as a cabbage. It grew brighter, then gave a loud pop and flickered out. He should have known better. Fred and George would have never given it to him if it worked. 

He followed the passage for about a minute, hands in front of him in case it came to a dead end. Just as he was ready to turn back, his questing left hand touched something solid and wooden. A door. Groping down its length, he encountered a handle and pulled back, careful to stand behind the door in case one of Hagrid's pets might be on the other side.

Instead, it opened on another section of the library. Harry stepped out, still distrustful. The same ugly blue-and-grey paper on the walls, same heavy, immobile tables, same long dull velvet curtains. Just more library, complete with the sub-audible library hush. A wry humour crept over him: Hermione would be livid when she found that Hogwarts had been keeping another whole wing of books from her. Shutting the door behind him, he stopped in the pool of sunlight beneath the open draperies and looked around, wondering again if he should call the others to him.

Wait a minute.

The sun shone in that imperturbable manner possessed only by the sun, cheerfully ignorant of the fact that dawn was not due for another eight hours. From nearby voices chattered--in hushed tones, of course, but nonetheless an unquestionable chatter--and two students walked by as if they knew exactly why they were there and where they were headed.

Harry rounded the corner just in time to walk into an amazingly pretty girl with large brown eyes. Her dark hair, parted down the middle and held back with two sparkling clips, hung in her face. She was taken aback only a moment before her eyes travelled over Harry's face, and she brightened noticeably as pushed back her hair and gave him a warm, dazzling smile.

"Hello, are you a new transfer?" She stuck out her hand for a handshake. He'd never seen her, either, even though on her right shoulder she wore a Gryffindor crest. Her robes were dark navy blue instead of dull black, and her cape fell just below her knee, unlike the standard floor-length one. "My name's Genevieve Montmorency. Vivi to my friends. Sixth year." 

He shook her hand. "Harry Potter. I'm sixth year, too. Gryffindor."

"I'm in Gryffindor, too, but I'm sure I'd remember you if I'd seen you. Hmm. Are you any relation to James Potter?" 

The temperature in his stomach seemed to plummet twenty degrees. "He was my father."

Vivi laughed brightly, her long hair shaking. "No, no, _James_ Potter. You know. Gryffindor's Seeker. He's only a seventh year--much too young to be your father, unless he had you when he was two or something. Are you sure you're not him?" 

Not entirely prepared to engage in Alice-in-Wonderland lines of questioning with strange young women, he replied, "Well, I haven't checked lately, but I wasme last time I looked."

"Can't be too careful with him. Last year, he and his lot pulled that Duplication prank. There was about six of each of them. The teachers were having aneurysms trying to straighten them out."

She laughed again as a sick feeling crept over Harry, as though he'd been punched in the throat. A question swam into his mind--a terrible question that rose the hair on the back of his neck. Before he could ask, the familiar chime of the bell filled the air, striking thrice. On his side of the bookcase it was nearly three in the morning; here, it seemed, time was twelve hours off.

"Bummer. I've got to go to class. Nice meeting you, Harry. See you." Vivi started to walk off. After a moment she seemed to reconsider and turned back around. "Oh, listen, Harry, some of my friends and I were planning on going down to Hogsmeade this weekend. Do you want to come with? We could . . . talk. Get to know one another." She smiled again, this time a little more than friendly.

_Good grief, she's trying to make a date._ Harry thought quickly. "I'd love to, Vivi, but I'm not allowed to leave the grounds this weekend." It was technically true, anyway, even though he was certainly a long way from the grounds just now. Or maybe not. 

"Detention, huh? What a drag. That's okay, you can keep Lauren company." She grinned, tucked her hair behind her ear, and gave him a little wave. "Maybe next week, then. See you later."

Feeling totally numb, Harry returned the wave. As Vivi minced off, he took a second, more meticulous look around. There was the barred door to the Restricted Section. There was the table where he studied with Hermione and Ron--the scars on the tabletop were visible from here, and even the chew-marks on the legs were in all the right places. The door he has just came through stood next to a slightly askew bookshelf; atop this shelf was written _Hogwarts Alumni Memorial Yearbook Shelf. _As he watched, the shelf rolled over the door, settling into place with a portentous clang, like prison gates.

This wasn't another section of the library. This _was_ the library.


	11. Severus

ELEVEN

_Now_, he thought, _is the time where I slip out the way I came in, go to **my** library, find Ron and Hermione, and all of us get back to our rooms before anyone suspects anything. _He knew damn well he wasn't about to do anything of the kind, but it was best to get the formality of thinking it out of the way--rather like playing "Rule Britannia" before opening the Quidditch Cup Tournament--as sort of a prelude to a riot. Hermione had known this was here. No; she'd only said there was a suite hidden behind the bookcase. Hermione wouldn't have been able to stop herself from telling one of them about a way into another Hogwarts. At the very least, she would have warned him tonight before she set him off alone to pillage the bookcase.

He wandered toward the front desk, his face carefully blank, trying to seem as much a browsing student as possible while his brain raced under the implications. Miss Pince was there, stamping books with a heavy, practiced hand. That much was the same.

If this was--_say it, Potter_--if this was the past, Harry could see the damage that might be done. It was like all those horrid films Dudley was keen on, where some blundering idiot went hop-skipping into the age of the dinosaurs and stepped on a beetle, and then came back to a world where Wellington had died a crib-death and everyone spoke French. Until just then, Harry thought those films were drivel; now he wished he'd seen a few more of them. What would happen if that girl he'd just spoken with was really a manic-depressive who went back to her room and swore herself to a life of celibacy because he'd dumped her, and then her daughter would never be born, and the daughter was supposed to grow up and forge a lasting peace between wizards and Muggles . . . this was already giving him a headache. It was also giving him too many ideas.

_What if I could find my parents and tell them to steer clear of Peter Pettigrew, how's that for an idea? What if I could find him myself and just . . . just take him out? Wouldn't even need a spell for that; I'd push him out a window and then run like hell back through the passage before anyone could stop me. What if I could tell Dumbledore about some of the Slytherins going over to Voldemort's side? Maybe he could stop them. Voldemort might never come to full power. People would still be alive: my parents, Cedric Diggory . . . ._

He put a lid on those thoughts, fast. It was exactly what Snape had warned him against. He tried to recall the exact conversation between Snape and Evensong, but the black spot had been there then, and it got in the way. The gist of it was clear: don't go snooping, and don't try to alter anything.

Which meant Snape had known he would do this. He had also said that everything had to come to him of its own accord, but that was impossible since he already _did _realise the significance of what was going on. Sort of. A little. He only had to do exactly what he would have done if he'd found this place by accident, without the warning. 

At this thought his whole brain seemed to cramp. It was impossible. There was no way he could behave exactly the way he would have done if he hadn't known, because there was no way of _not _knowing what he _did_ know. His head whirled as it struggled to find some level ground in this churning muddle of ramifications. 

Right now all that was coming naturally was an insistent urge to use the toilet.

He tried to ignore it, but it was one of those things that only got worse the longer it was disregarded. There was a bathroom just outside and up the hall from the library. He could make it there and out in five minutes, tops. Then he would go back to the real library. 

_Please, please, don't let me screw up the course of history by needing to take a leak._

He left the library through the main doors. The empty passage was just the same: right would take him back to the stairwell and Gryffindor--_his _Gryffindor or otherwise--and left led to the Astronomy hall, the narrow stairs to the Divination tower, and the boy's loo. Nothing would get accomplished by his hiding in any version of the dorms (and, he reasoned, the password would be a little ahead of its time), so he started left, where voices filtered through classroom doors, telling him that in this Hogwarts, classes were almost done for the day.

He was just leaving the bathrooms when a bugling voice nailed his shoes to the floor. 

"Potter! What are you doing here?"

Hurrying toward him was a strange woman with shoulder-length, startlingly white hair and a long oval face. Around her waist she wore a silver chatelaine similar to McGonagall's, the cumbersome loop of keys jangling against her hip, and the Gryffindor Head-of-House badge on her shoulder, but she certainly didn't look like Professor McGonagall or anyone else Harry knew. She bustled swiftly up the hallway, frowning. "Why are you still in the halls, Mister Potter? If you get one more demerit--" 

Stepping into the light, she seemed to get a good look at him at last and paused, confused. 

"Oh, I'm sorry, lad. Thought you were someone else." Her face hardened to its former severity. "But whoever you are, I'm sure you're late for something. Go to." 

"Yes, Professor, I was just leaving." He trotted dutifully down the hall away from the library, trying his best to look like a obedient, well-behaved pupil despite his lack of books, and thanking whatever powers that watched over wayward students the woman hadn't noticed his off-colour robes. As soon as he was safely out of sight, he doubled back and peeped around the corner. Damn! She was still there, now chatting with another professor right in front of the library doors.

Harry headed down the corridor, down the same passageways he had known for years, everything familiar and yet not, until he came out on the third floor balcony overlooking the games yard. This _was_ what he would be doing, he justified, if he'd come into this position unaware: he would snoop. 

The sun was wintry-bright, the air brisk and chill. The four house pennants fluttered on either end of the field, making sharp, rippling snaps in the high wind. Quidditch practice was in session in the yard: players in Gryffindor red and gold zipping in and out of patterns, shouting to each other, laughing as someone took a Bludger to the tail of his broom and pinwheeled sideways like a bicycle spinning out on a patch of ice. Watching them made Harry feel oddly homesick, a stranger even though he'd never left home.

Fascinated, he slowly descended the steep stone stair to the yard, crossing the old walkway without taking his eyes from the players in the air. He wasn't alone; some older boys on their free period sat on the front of the stands, watching the practice. He didn't dare to go sit with them for fear of someone asking who he was and what he was doing here, but he couldn't help drawing nearer to the edge of the field, close enough to have a good view of the action, far enough not to attract the attention of a wandering Bludger. 

The Keeper got behind a fast-moving Quaffle and kicked it back to the playing field as someone else--it came from the direction of the Seeker but Harry couldn't be sure--cried out. With his own keen Seeker vision Harry spotted the fall of something small and glittering, big enough to be the Snitch but the wrong shape. Just as he reached the edge of the field, someone in the air shouted, "_Hold!_" 

The players paused in midair, groaning and muttering, as the Gryffindor Seeker broke formation. Descending to only a yard or so above the turf, he moved slowly across the edge of the field, squinting as he scanned the grass. One of the boys in the stands laughed, "Next time you lose those things, I'm Spellotaping 'em to your head!"

Shading his eyes, the Seeker gave him an exasperated look. "You might give me a hand finding the blasted things, Sirius; we're not going to get much practice done with me running into people every ten seconds."

Harry, fortunately, had noticed where the whatever-it-was had landed. Trying not to attract a Bludger--both of which were still hurtling about, dive-bombing players--he crossed the lower field, hunting in the dead winter grass until he came to about the right spot, then scouting until he discovered a forlorn pair of wire-rimmed glasses. A rather large chip was missing from one of the lens, a lump of tape attached the earpiece to the frames, and the right hinge was held together with a bent hairpin, as if the owner might have crash-landed a few too many times for safety. 

Waving the glasses over his head, he signalled to the Seeker. "Oy, over here! I've got 'em!"

The Seeker did a smooth midair turn and whizzed to Harry's side, breaking with admirable control. "Yeah, cool. Thanks."

Harry's palms were damp as he handed the glasses over. It was hard to tell while he was still on his broom, but the Seeker looked perhaps an inch taller than Harry himself. He was angular, skinny, with a wicked grin, black windblown hair swept back from his face, and a small scar on his chin--not good-looking, but the grin made up for a lot. The word that came to mind was _dashing, _which was a word Harry associated with knights in armour, not a fellow Quidditch player in grass-stained red-and-gold. The broom was a imported Thorshammer 500, which Harry had seen only in the "One Hundred Best Brooms of the Century" issue of _Which Broomstick._ As he recalled, the Thorshammer was somewhere in the top twenty. 

"You're really great up there," Harry said, inadequately. "You're really . . . um, great."

"Well, I like to think so." He settled them on his nose, blinking a few times to adjust. "There, much better. I'm terrifically farsighted without 'em."

"Yeah," said Harry, his throat gone suddenly dry. "I'll bet you are."

From far above, the Keeper called, "Are you going spend all day blethering with your slacker friends, Jim, or are we going to play?" In the stands the aforementioned slacker friends hissed and mimed casting hexes on the Keeper.

"Duty calls." He gave Harry a strong, dazzling smile. "Thanks again." The Seeker ascended, and before Harry could stop himself he called, "Jim?"

Jim waited expectantly, the broom bobbing in the air above Harry's head.

He intended it to sound casual, but the words came out with more emotion than he knew. "Take care of yourself, why don't you?"

"Will do." Jim gave him the thumbs-up, then ascended to join his impatient team. 

A knot came up in his throat. Quietly he returned to the comforting shadow of Hogwarts, which would always be there, and ascended the stairs two at a time, back to the third floor entrance. 

Classes were just letting out, and students queued in the halls, trying to get down the main stairs for dinner. In this throng he might be able to get back to the library without notice. He slipped into the flow of bodies, jostling along with the rest, when a very bony elbow came out of nowhere, aimed dead at his nose. He ducked his head just in time, but the blow caught him on the side of the temple hard enough to make him chomp down on his tongue and knock his glasses askew. 

A smirky voice that sounded exactly as if it belonged to the elbow came from nearby. "Sorry. Perhaps you'd better use the midget passage."

Harry straightened his glasses, shut his eyes, counted three, and thought to himself, _When I look up next I am going to see a very tall, skinny Slytherin._

He opened his eyes. It worked. Only there wasn't just one Slytherin, there were three, all of them hurrying away chuckling to themselves, and if the one in the middle wasn't Draco Malfoy's dad then Harry would eat peppermint until he chucked up. Same pinched ferrety face as his son, same fair hair. Portrait of the bastard as a young man. The thin, mean-mouthed boy to Malfoy's left was unfamiliar. The one on the right seemed like a chunkier, blue-eyed edition of Gregory Goyle.

He ran his bitten tongue over his teeth, tasting blood. "Hey, Lucius!"

Lucius looked around, seeming surprised when he saw Potter standing firm amid the rushing students, his arms crossed, his face resolute. Harry guessed that his usual prey never talked back. Looking at young Lucius, it occurred to Harry that one swift, hard kick to the cods now would make his entire school career that much less bothersome thirty years later.

"Heard you got a tattoo over the summer," Harry told him. "Can I see it?"

Lucius went three shades more sallow than Harry thought possible for anyone not afflicted with terminal liver failure. He wanted to come after him, that was certain, and his bully friends looked as if they would be glad to do the job for him, but there were too many people around and all four of them knew it. That look of disbelief, the childish dread of being found out, told Harry everything he needed to know: Lucius Malfoy had taken the Dark Mark as early as his final year at Hogwarts. He had a weird moment of perverse sympathy for Draco. Growing up with a dad like that . . . Malfoy never had a chance. 

_Right. So I've seen my father play Quidditch, and I've scared the fear of Potter into Lucius Malfoy. If I die tomorrow, I will have lived a full and happy life._

After a moment's conference, the three Slytherins broke free of the pummel and headed back the way they had come, toward Slytherin Hall. Harry would have given anything for his Invisibility Cloak and a clear shot at following. 

On the heels of that thought came another: in _this _Hogwarts therewas a way to obtain both of those things, if he could only figure out the password to Gryffindor.

A young Gryffindor girl, possibly a first-term, sat on a nearby hall bench. She and her equally young friend kept sneaking glances at Harry, then turning to each other and giggling like gossiping sparrows. First-years. Perfect. Ones who no doubt had never been within Bludger-bashing distance of the real Jim Potter. 

Harry smoothed down his hair, tried to imitate Jim Potter's devastating smile, and, feeling as if he were in a rather bad play, sauntered up to the girls. They froze, going from dead white to pink to hot furious magenta. The first girl's mouth dropped open, exposing a half-chewed piece of gum stuck between her teeth.

"Look, girls," he said, with as much sophistication as he could muster--and it did come easier when he was supposed to be his father rather than just plain Harry Potter who lived with Muggles during the summer. "I must be going mental, but I've totally forgotten the house password. Do either of you know what it is?"

The first girl seemed in a trance that Jim Potter would deign to speak to her. The other, more level-headed, managed to stammer, "It's ah . . . er . . . 'peppermint toad'. I think."

_It would be the one sweet on Earth that I hate_. "Thanks."

He headed back toward the Fat Lady's portrait. Behind him the girls burst into a new flurry of frantic twittering, this one sounding more mouse-like than sparrow-like.

"Peppermint toad," he said, and hoped it would work. 

The Fat Lady squinted down her opera glasses at him. "Have I seen you somewhere before, young man?"

Without thinking he blurted, "This morning, after breakfast. I was the one who forgot his Potions book and had to get back in a hurry." 

No doubt the Fat Lady had heard similar tales of woe throughout her entire career at Hogwarts. Graciously, she nodded, and the portal swung wide. Harry dashed in, startled at the sheer number of lies he was accumulating as he moved through Hogwarts and wondering if one of them might come back to haunt him. Oh, well. In for a Knut, in for a Galleon. 

He got a few curious glances from the few students that remained in the Common Room, but answered them with smiles, nods, and a sense of purposefulness. He didn't want to stick out in anyone's mind as unfriendly. From constant confrontations with various Slytherins he knew that unsociable people were easy to remember, but friendly ones who seemed to belong tended to fade into the background of one's mind. A smile and a flash of the Gryffindor patch seemed to satisfy most of them, and he moved unhindered up the stairs to the boys' dorms. 

Now it would be a problem of trying to figure out which room had been his father's. _Was_ his father's. He thought he was going to have to walk into random rooms until he found a set of occupants who didn't shout at him to leave, but the reality was much simpler. One door in the boy's dorm possessed a small hand-lettered notice reading "Plotting in Progress. Trespassers Will Be Hurled Violently Backwards by Lupin's Morning Breath." Beneath this declaration was a set of initials: P_, W, M, & P_.

In the middle of all the chaos, this was the thing that checked him. He laid a hand on the little sign with a feeling of near veneration. _P, W, M, & P_. Padfoot, Wormtail, Moony, and Prongs. Boasting it right out in the open, where no one would assume it was anything more a bunch of odd nicknames--Potter's crowd acting weird again. Until only a few years ago, even Dumbledore hadn't known about the unregistered Animagi in their midst. They had been a bold lot, his father and his friends. 

That inexplicable, heartbroken feeling of homesickness washed over him again, stronger than before. Ron and Hermione were great, the best friends of his life, but knowing that did not erase the knowledge that he would never have friends like these four had once been. He almost wished he could leave them a note warning them that they were coming to an end. In only a few years Wormtail would betray them, Padfoot would spend twelve years in prison, and Prongs--James Potter--would . . ..

He pushed the urge away. That would definitely be changing too much.

He knocked timidly, plotting a story about borrowing a quill-knife. When there was no answer from within, he pushed the door open.

The room was empty. Of course it would be: they were probably still all down on the Quidditch field, or else at dinner. Either way, he had at least another half-hour, but it was best to pretend they could walk in at any minute. The prospect of being caught stealing by a young, bad-tempered Remus Lupin or Sirius Black--or, somehow even worse, Jim Potter--was not a comforting one, but it made for a wonderful incentive to hurry it up. Inside, the place looked very much like the way Ron left a room, only more so, since Harry had a habit of tidying the place up and it looked like this lot never did. He stood in the centre of the room, trying to think. If he were his father, where would he hide a Cloak of Invisibility?

With no clues forthcoming, the best he could do was rummage. Here the messy room was an advantage, since it already looked as if it had just been looted, but the drawback was that in the chaos he couldn't remember where he had already searched. When he found it at last, he had to laugh. It was exactly the same place _he_ would have hidden it--in a false bottom under his trunk. 

He pointed his wand at the trunk. "_Incantatem dispellarmus_."

Nothing seemed to happen when the Charm-Breaker Spell hit the trunk. Harry gingerly pried off the false bottom, noting as he did so what a trusting soul his dad had been: no traps or charms to keep off would-be thieves or roommates who might double as occasional borrowers. As soon as he had the cloak, he swung it over his shoulders, noticing as he did that it felt different--heavier, thicker. Newer. It was safer to keep it on for now, as eventually someone was going to realise he wasn't Jim Potter or a Duplicate thereof or even a new student who happened to look like him. He left Gryffindor house with only a perplexed look from the Fat Lady, who wasn't yet used to being opened by non-visible parties. 

Malfoy was out there somewhere. And Snape. But, he reminded himself, so were his mum and dad.

Invisible, he slipped down the hall and took the unfamiliar left-hand turned toward Slytherin tower.

* * *

The stone serpent warded the passage to Slytherin. Harry sat in its shadow and waited. It had been close to an hour since he'd left Gryffindor. Dinner was long since over, and someone should be hurrying back to their dorm, as he doubted that Slytherins were any more fastidious about returning to their dorms on time than any other House in Hogwarts. Less, if he could venture a guess. The waiting paid off as two girls, a very small one who looked like a third-year and a much older one with a auburn braid swinging to the middle of her back, approached from the far end of the hall. Harry fell into silent step behind them as they came under the watching snake's cold shadow. 

"_Pass-s-s-word?_" 

The girl with the braid stepped briskly up to the statue, her chin in the air. "'Now'_._"

"_Enter_." The serpent slid back to reveal an archway behind it. The taller girl marched inside; Harry followed behind the younger one. The giant statue undulated its stone neck. "_Not you._"

"I'm with her; I'm just going to my room."

"_Not you._" Harry could have sworn the eyes flickered, focusing on him.

"But I've been here for five years," she protested. "Look, you let me in or you're a eight-foot-high pile of rubble." 

She was still stamping her foot and asserting her rights as Harry slipped around her and headed into the dorms. 

No immediate sense of doom pervaded him. There were no Hands of Glory or amulets of Saturn's Might arranged in immediate display on the coffee tables, no skulls of lowerclassmen from rival houses exhibited atop the chimney ledge, no glossy posters of Voldemort on the walls. It was only another room, this one upholstered in silver-grey and emerald, with the same style of ugly, comfortable chairs and desks. Even the glowing fireplace was in the same spot. Students lounged about, doing studies or chatting; two of them were seated at the chessboard, locked in a debate over whether or not adjusting a piece meant that it had to be moved. It would been easier to tolerate if there _had_ been bloodstains on the walls instead of all this . . . all this _ordinary_. 

Curled contentedly in the fireside corner--what Harry would be doing right now if he had his way--the auburn-haired girl was seated on a footstool next to a dark-haired young man whose chair, pushed into the corner, provided a excellent view of the rest of the room. With his boots propped up on a second footstool, he flipped through a book, and the girl leaned against his armrest as she silently read over his shoulder. Harry registered the book's title--_Moste Potente Potions_--and placed it just seconds before the second Slytherin girl marched into the Commons, nearly walking into Harry. 

At once he flattened against the wall and held his breath, but the girl was too miffed to feel the graze of his cloak against her leg. 

"The stupid snake wasn't going to let me in," she complained. "Thought I was going to have to threaten its miserable life to get through."

"Isis, you couldn't threaten a doorknob."

"Shove it, Amarantha." She threw her books down in a huff. "I hate that snake. First it decides to change the password all on its own, then it sits there hissing 'Not you, not you,' until you want to cut off its head with a garden hoe."

"It only does that," remarked the young man from behind the protection of his book, "when someone who doesn't belong is trying to get in. Are you smuggling Hufflepuffs into the dorm again, Isis?"

"I couldn't very well tell him kiss off, Severus, he's my stupid kid brother. Six generations of Slytherins, and look who's stuck with the reject. Somebody give me a cigarette. I'm dying. That McGonagall's a full-blown harpy."

The boy in the chair reached into his robe pocket and passed her a pack, then lit it for her. The pack made the rounds to Amarantha before he took one himself and put the rest away.

It was Snape. Only a year older here than Harry, totally changed from the man he knew as a professor, but still striking enough that under a different set of circumstances Harry would have mistaken him for Snape's son, or a much-younger brother. The hair was longer and thicker, and the face clean-cut, with razor-sharp cheekbones and jaw and none of the stark lines in the forehead or around the mouth. The eyes were exactly the same: midnight black, glittering like fractured obsidian, aloof and untouchable. Only one person in the world could hold an expression that way, in control and yet wholly inscrutable.

The first girl, Amarantha, said, "McGonagall doesn't have the belly for Transfiguration. You watch. She'll be packing her bags by next September."

Isis took a deep pull, held it, and puffed smoke like a dragon when she spoke. "By Christmas, if I have my way."

Harry couldn't pull his eyes from Severus. It was unbelievable the changes time had wrought. At the same time a cold injection seemed to pump through all his limbs, replacing the fluid in his backbone with ice water. Even knowing how Snape would turn out in later years didn't help the reckless fury he was feeling now, the blind urge to reach out and wrap his fingers around the man's neck.

Severus kept glancing away from his book. Harry watched his eyes closely. From here it looked as if he was reading the same few lines, over and over, only moving along when Amarantha nudged him to turn the page. Finally he shut the book, keeping his finger in to hold his place. 

"Do you ever get that feeling of being watched?" His words seemed to be directed at the two girls, but they carried to the whole Commons.

_Oh, bloody hell._

"Something going on, Severus?" Amarantha asked.

"Something's always going on." From another person this might have sounded derisive. From him, it came out as a mere statement of fact. He closed his book and stood. "If Malfoy ever turns up, I'll be in my room." 

"Shifty Sevvie." Isis slipped around to occupy his vacated chair. "You and Lucius are thick as thieves nowadays. People will say you're in love."

He disappeared behind a tapestry that seemed to depict a large sea-serpent swallowing a whole lion, and his heavy boots reverberated up the stone stairs. Harry made a dash for it, not pausing when several people saw the tapestry flipped back a second time on its own. Here Harry had at least two advantages--silent, soft-soled sneakers, and the sound of boots on a hard floor to cover any sound he might make.

Snape entered his door and let it swing shut behind him, giving Harry barely enough time to slip under his outstretched arm. There was a small, automatic clack of metal on metal; Harry would think about it later. Snape took off his cloak, hung it on a hook, and went to his desk with his book.

So this was Snape's dorm. It didn't look as if anybody else had been here in ages; all but one of the bed looked as freshly made-up as if they were waiting for students on the first day of the year. He wondered if Snape had managed to talk his way into a private room, or if there were just so few Slytherins this year as to allow single occupants.

_Maybe he killed off his roommates,_ Harry thought. On second thought, that wasn't remotely funny.

Directly behind him came a knock at the door. Harry jumped, then automatically slipped away to avoid being struck by the opening door. Severus sighed, and Harry recognised it as the sigh Hermione let out when she was pestered while reading. "Who's there?"

"Lucius." 

He snapped his fingers. The bolt on the door flew back. "Come in."

Malfoy came in, turning around at once to draw the bolt, which straight away registered the circumstances as questionable. So far as he knew, student rooms did not have bolts. He wondered if it was a Slytherin thing or strictly Snape.

"Amarantha said you were looking for me," said Malfoy. "I was hoping you'd still be up." He pulled up a chair and sat across from Severus, who gave another enormous sigh and returned _Moste Potente Potions _to the top of a pile of similar tomes. 

Malfoy gave a sharp, fleeting scowl. "Sorry to tear you away from your one true love, Severus, but something rather pressing's come up. If you can spare a moment of your time."

"Better reading than knocking books out of little girls' arms in the hallways, Lucius. I understand that seems to be your lot's strong suit these days."

"You've got a bit of a lip on you, don't you?" Malfoy settled himself into the chair, crossing his legs and raising his chin a notch. So _that_ was where Draco got that pose.

Harry drew to the far corner, where he could still see everything but ran no risk of being trod on or collided with. Near his hand, on a bedside table, sat a large cut-glass vial: hold it by the long end, smash it against the stones, go for the eyes. No, that was a stupid idea. Instead, he took out his own wand and held it hidden under the cloak, waiting his chance.

Severus's black eyes focused like a hawk's. "You look uneasy. What's gone on?" 

"Something odd happened earlier. Really odd. Some Gryffindor stopped me in the middle of a crowded hall and asked to see my tattoo. He knew exactly what he was talking about, Severus, I could see it in his eyes." 

"Who was it?"

"That's the trouble, none of us know. Brawnson thought at first it was James Potter. So did I, until I heard him speak."

"What did he look like?"

"Black hair, shaggy. Glasses. About Potter's size, which is what threw me at first; there's not a lot of people that small at Hogwarts. And a Gryffindor."

"Anything else?"

"No. He shook me so much, we headed off the other way. Didn't see him at the dinner hour. I even asked What's-His-Name, Rattail, about him. He said he'd never seen anyone like. Have you spoken to him at all this week?"

Rattail? _Wormtail. _

"Not recently. He's got that look about him, though. I believe he's going to be fair game, if he can be talked up a bit more. That would be your job, Lucius. He doesn't seem to like me. Get him alone. And don't bother with Lupin again, no matter how much he tries to bait you. Last thing we need is for you to get bitten some night; there's a menagerie running about this place after dark as it is."

"Besides," said Malfoy, sounding as if he were quoting, "Lupin belongs to _you_."

The cold demeanour fell to the wayside. He stood up, pacing. There was a worn spot in the rug on the path he had chosen. "Those bastards set me up. I damn near got myself killed over that. Just because Sirius Black and Moony Lupin thought it might be interesting to see the look on my face. I'm not fond of jokes, and I'm not entirely certain that Jim Potter wasn't chuckling up his sleeve at that one as well."

"He pulled you back out of the passage."

"He probably got weak-stomached over the notion of seeing blood. He's a coward, a big talker. All flash and no bang."

"And he took Lily," Malfoy said softly. He seemed to be enjoying it.

Snape turned sharply on his heel. "Give it up, Malfoy. You honestly don't still think I was ever seriously interested in that sparrow-brained little mudblood, do you? Jim was welcome to her, as far as I was concerned. I was glad to have the sex-mad bitch off my hands. Gave me a chance to breathe in private."

Harry very nearly threw back the cloak then and there. He only just stopped himself by biting the sore spot on his tongue until it started bleeding again. The taste subdued him. He could wait until Malfoy left before he made a move. 

There was a long, deadly quiet between them, Malfoy with his hands behind his head, looking very much as if he were enjoying a really good play. Severus folded his arms around himself, looking taller and more gaunt than ever. His face was a carefully cultivated blank.

"Methinks the wizard doeth protest too much," Malfoy said at last.

"It doesn't matter," Severus said, not moving. "He'll be taken care of, sooner or later. And frankly, I don't care if Lily goes up with the boom." 

He went back to his desk, took _Moste Potente Potions_ from the top of the stack again, and, flipping to find his place, began to read.

Malfoy stood up. "I enjoy these chats of ours, Severus. Is that it? You start up reading again, and I'm supposed to leave?"

"That's the idea," he said, without looking up.

"What about the Gryffindor?"

"If you see him again, find me. I want a look at him."

"And then what?"

"And then I'll handle it," he replied simply, still reading his books. From his tone he might have been talking about the weather. Harry had never been so chilled in his life as he was at those five straightforward words. Suddenly even Voldemort didn't hold a candle.

Malfoy paused, one hand on the latch. "You're the one around here who's supposed to know what he's doing. Don't throw it all away on a girl and a stupid prank. There are bigger things at stake, Severus. Think about it."

He left, leaving Harry shaking and white with rage.

The Slytherin password was a good one: now. He pushed back the hood of his cloak, and was treated to the unnerving sight of watching himself materialise in the full-length mirror across the way. He picked up the glass vial, lifted it over his head, and smashed it on the floor.

Severus didn't look up. "Are you still here, Lucius?"

"You know," said Harry coldly, "an otherwise intelligent man once told me that one tends to be defined by one's associates. What should I think of you?"

With a swiftness born of expertise, Severus's stood up in a rush of black robes, his left hand going to his inner pocket. 

"Snape. Turn around. And keep your hands where I can see them or so help me, they'll find you imbedded in the wall." His voice trembled with ferocity, though he fought with everything in him to keep control. Snape had been a duelling master when he was younger. It was going to take every particle of concentration to keep himself one step ahead, although two steps would be preferable, but if he could manage it, he might make it out of this walking nightmare alive.

His hand did not withdraw. Before he could pull out a wand Harry's was up, the tip pointing at Snape's face. "Where I can _see _them!" 

Severus paused for a moment, then the hand crept with nothing more threatening than his cigarettes and a lighter. Not the gold one with his initials, but a smoky green one patterned with dragon scales. When he clicked the button, the lighter burned with a bright blue flame.

"God, I've sidestepped into Hell." He got the cigarette started, setting both the pack and the lighter on the arm of his chair. "The Potters are multiplying. Very funny, Jim. Invisibility cloaks, sneaking past the door-guard--do you have no sense of self-preservation, or do you just have to have one last hurrah at my expense before you graduate?"

"I'm not James Potter. I wish to God I were. Because he wasn't a coward, no matter what you seemed to think. He saved your life once, and you never had it in you to be grateful. Lupin would have killed you, if he'd caught you, and it would have been your own fault. Nobody forced you down that tunnel. You went on your own."

Harry advanced, wand out. He knew about six really nasty spells, spells that would stop someone or hurt them really badly, but one good one was all it would take. 

"What are you, his brother?" Severus stepped closer. 

"I've always meant to ask you what your problem was with James Potter. You've always seemed to have it in for him. Now I know." His father's name had been spoken in hidden places by this man; he had won over Peter Pettigrew, who sold his parents to Voldemort, and now all had come full-circle to Harry. It would be worth it, he thought, to destroy everything that came afterwards to bring this whole miserable game to an end. 

Severus tossed the half-finished cigarette to the floor and ground it out. Harry stepped into the ring of torchlight, well away from Severus, trying to remember everything he'd read about duelling. All he remember was to never look at the opponent's face; always watch his body, and keep track of every move.

Severus's eyes widened briefly as he got a clear look at Harry at last. They narrowed at once, the expression of alarm vanishing as if it had never been there, but Harry had seen his shock and they both knew it. 

"I should have known," he said softly. "You have Lily Evan's eyes." 

Severus shook out a second cigarette from his pack and drew it toward the burning lighter.

"Those things will kill you, you know," said Harry quietly.

"Probably," he agreed, and, spitting the cigarette from the side of his mouth, blew hard across the tiny flame, which mushroomed to a dragon-like gout of fire leaping directly at Harry's face. 

It seared him, seeped under one lens of his glasses which exploded outward with the heat. He heard a crackling near his ear, smelled burning hair. Frantically he swatted at one side of his face. The sleeve of his robe caught briefly and went out. The pain in his face was bigger than the world; it totally excluded all rational thought.

From behind him: "_Mobilarbus!"_

A piece of quartz the size of a Quaffle lifted from the desk and slammed into Harry's side just under the armpit as he raised his own wand. It hurt to breath, but he managed to choke out, _"Incendio!" _

The front of Severus's robes flared in bright green fire, leaping dangerously close to his face, and in the time it distracted him Harry managed to point his wand again. _"Expelliarmus!" _In his panic all sense of proportion was lost; the wand snapped out of Severus's hand hard enough to wrench his entire wrist backwards. 

By the time he recovered his weapon, Harry was on his feet--one hand pressed to his ribs, the other locked around his wand--scrabbling at the bolt, and flying through Slytherin's Commons, jumping over a student on the floor and pushing another out of the way on his way to the door. His shoulder slammed hard into the stone snake; he could no longer see from his left eye and didn't know whether the blindness had been caused by the brilliant flare, the rapidly swelling blisters on his face, or if the fire had damaged the eye itself. It hurt too bad to wonder long. As long as he had the one good eye and feet that would take him, he was going to get out of here.

He took the back halls, clambering down the steep dark steps from Slytherin, past what would one day later be Snape's potions hall, and through a tiny passage almost too narrow for his shoulders; he had to turn sideways, stone scraping his belly. Footsteps pounded up the halls behind him as he wiggled out on the other side. No time to think; just run just run--

He was within sight of the back steps to third floor; he and Ron had used this passage on hundreds of occasions, most memorably the time they'd used Polyjuice to sneak into Slytherin. It was the best way to get almost anywhere on the third floor unobserved. Halfway up the stairs, the unclasped cloak fell from his shoulders. He skidded to a halt, turned around, scrabbling for it--and then was flying off again for the library as Lucius Malfoy squirmed from the narrow passage. Severus was right on his heels. Harry missed a step, tripped, turned the fall into a roll down the stairs just as Lucius's voice rang out, _"Stupefy!" _

It missed him on the ground, but if spells had mass then Harry might have felt the wind off it. The fall had knocked the wand from his hand. On his back like a turtle, no way to run, he shouted with as much intensity as he could muster, "Avada kedavra!"

Lucius stopped in his tracks, his blue eyes widening, one hand grapping for his heart, while Harry clambered back to his hands and knees, snatched his fallen wand from the third stair, and got to his feet under him. Running was agony, and he wasn't sure he'd make it to the library. It felt like pencils jabbing between his ribs, into his lungs, but satisfaction kept him moving: Lucius Malfoy had fallen for the bluff. 

Severus started for him, and this time the spell wasn't anything he'd learned at Hogwarts. 

_"Crucio!"_


	12. Paradox

TWELVE

It took his legs out from under him, knocking him to the side that had already taken a blow from the quartz, but the stabbing in his chest was nothing compared to the agony--pain too huge to think around, too much pain to even consider--that paralysed his entire body. All his muscles stiffened, his heart felt like it had squeezed shut, and worse than anything his lungs refused to breath. He could only suck in tiny half-sips of air. Worst of all, worst than anything, was the feeling in his head as if someone far off were howling in agony, which petrified him even as he thought, _yes, keep screaming, someone will hear you, someone will come help me-- _

Then he recognised his own voice; he was screaming, and nobody was coming at all.

Somehow he would have to get himself going again, crawling up those stairs. There were only four to the top. It might as well have been miles.

He managed a single stair, crawling on his elbows, shuddering before Malfoy caught him by the back of the cloak.

"What the hell did was that?"

"The Cruciatus Curse. Might want to pick it up yourself, one day."

Lucius hauled him roughly to the bottom of the stairs, then hurled him to the floor, banging his ribs so hard that Harry saw a flash of purple light behind his squeezed-shut eyes. He felt something dripping from the corner of his mouth and swiped it with his hand. The hand came away smeared scarlet.

"That's the one." A hard kick fell on his already damaged side. "Little bastard. That's the one I saw in the hall. We've got to get him out of here if we're going to do anything. Somebody's bound to have heard his noise."

"No. There's a Blocking Spell on this whole hallway now. No one's going to be coming. We've got time." His tone made time sound like a very, very menacing thing to have. 

Harry rolled his eyes up to Severus. There were burns on his face, not bad ones, but on the pale skin they looked huge and discoloured. 

"So I wasn't wrong, then," said Severus. "The Potters really _are_ multiplying. I don't know how you got here, but don't think for a minute I don't know who you are."

"Severus, someone's coming." Lucius sounded panicky.

"_Nobody's_ coming; there's a Block up!" He turned back to Harry. "Why are you here?"

He couldn't think to talk. His lips parted, and a syrupy mix of drool and sticky blood flowed over his chin, his neck, into the front of his robes. 

"I think you knocked him stupid with whatever that was, Severus."

"More's the pity. Go back to the dorms and get one of your lot. Get Goyle; he's the biggest. We're taking him to the Forest."

Malfoy nodded, then ran back down the hall.

When he was gone, Severus caught Harry by the throat and lifted, his thumb digging into the knot of gristle behind Harry's adam's-apple as he pressed him against the wall at eye-level. Harry half-choked, half-sneezed a spray of dark red droplets, which splattered over Severus's unblinking face.

"You're not fooling anyone. I didn't knock anything out of you with that. Now tell me why you're here and how you came."

"Can't . . . very well . . . talk . . . you holding me . . . like this."

Severus suddenly frowned, looking confused, like a dog on the hunt led up a false trail. He glanced down at Harry's arm, then suddenly ripped back the left sleeve of Harry's robes. Severus circled his forearm with his fingers, stroking very slowly from wristbone to elbow, almost a caress as he traced the length of Harry's wrist. As he did the pressure on Harry's throat slackened, then drew tight as a noose when Severus dropped the arm and thrust his face to his.

"You've got it, too," he said slowly. "It's just not where I can see it, is it?"

The edges of Harry's vision started to throb and turn grey, rapidly brightening to white. If he passed out before he could answer, Severus would kill him, right here in the halls, and probably get away with it. A very clear image came to mind: Hagrid patrolling the Forbidden Forest, thirty years from now, stumbling across a very small stack of bones and wondering who they might have once been. The picture of this gave him a fresh burst of strength. 

Twisting against the hand on his throat, blood pounding his head, Harry felt his feet scuffle against the stone wall and looked dead in the face of Severus Snape, close enough to see the faint, splintered bronze flecks in his dark eyes. 

There was still one trick left, and if it didn't work, he was dead. No one here would even notice he was gone, so he had to make it count. With what remained of his rational mind he thought, _Might as well try. Been meaning to do it for a couple years now, anyway._

He brought his knee up and drove it into Severus's balls.

Harry hit the floor in a heap, the jar knocking his ribs again and his head spinning. Snape, too, was on his floor, holding himself. He made a grab for Harry, but the shock of landing had done a great job of clearing some of the red mist from Harry's brain. He stomped on the hand that came for him, then bolted for the stairs, glancing behind him as he got his wand back into his hand once more. Lucius had returned, alone, and was helping Severus to his feet. 

Like a bad dream starting from the beginning, worse than before, a woman's voice above him shouted, "Potter, what are you _doing_ here?"

Professor Evensong caught hold of his arm and bore down on it, hard. As she did, he heard a sound like a door closing. The outside world went smudgy and vague as she dragged him up the remaining stairs.

From the lower floor he heard Malfoy shout: "Damn it! He Disapparated!" 

"How could he fucking Disapparate? You can't Disapparate in Hogwarts! Go get Goyle!" The sound of boots on stone as Snape struggled to his feet again.

"Think I may have ruined your next date, Professor," Harry panted, not quite in control of himself yet.

"Gods, you're hurt. What were you _thinking?_" She sounded as if she were speaking in a very small room. "You haven't any business here. Neither of us does."

He clutched his ribs. His heart still felt constricted, as if litres of blood were trying to squeeze their way through too-small veins. "Actually, I'm just finding out I have quite a lot of business on this side."

"Come on." She jerked him, hard enough to start him moving forward in spite of the throbbing pain in his side. "I've got very little time before this Transtempulary Potion wears off. Keep hold to me."

"No." He halted in his tracks. The fog in his brain seemed to clear. "Snape is plotting something against my father. On _this_ side. I've got to find out what it is."

"Whatever it is, it's _already happened._ You've no protection on this side, Harry; you've forgotten just where you are."

"In Hogwarts. In the version of Hogwarts where my parents and Snape are students at the same time." He tried to jerk away again, but her grip seemed fastened to his bones.

"Yes, yes, I know that," she hissed, as if an alternative Hogwarts resided behind most of the world's bookcases. "And do you remember who's still at his full power on this side? Who probably knows you're here already? _You don't exist here_, Harry. If the Dark Lord came for you on this side nobody would even notice you were gone."

"How would _he_ know I was here? How could he even know who I was?" 

"I told you. Dark calls to dark, and you _reek_ of him. He'd smell you out like a dire hound hunting a rabbit. And even if _he_ didn't, that mad-man was going to kill you just then; he still will, if he catches you. Come on! I've got less than a minute to get you home before I end up back at the other Hogwarts." She jerked him toward the stairwell. 

Just as hard, Harry jerked her in the opposite direction. "That way's the cellars. The library's _this_ way!"

Footsteps on the stairs. Evensong shook her head, glancing over her shoulder. Severus had followed him, still limping, his face a masque of fury as his fierce eyes darted all about, trying to find the person who had eluded him. 

"The library passage is the way in. The way out is through the sub-cellar. It leads off one corner. It should already be open. Go _on_, Harry!" Her body seemed to flicker, like a candle guttering out. She gave him a hard push toward the cellar steps vanishing like smoke as she let go of his hand.

As soon as she did, Severus seemed to spot him. "_Opticallis nox!_"

__

"Arrest!" Whatever Severus had thrown at him seemed to bend and curve to the other side. From the sound of it, it had been a Blind-Eye curse. Some times the things you learned in Dark Arts really did pay off. _"Stupefy!"_

"Arrest!" He was quick; Harry would have to be faster.

There wasn't time enough to be fast. Harry threw himself down the narrow steps to the sub-cellar, came to a landing, twisted around it, and kept heading down, deep into the sour-smelling pits six storeys below. He couldn't go on much longer while the Cruciatus Curse was still filling him with the desire to simply lie down and let himself be killed by the next thing that came along, anything to end the agony. Severus Snape was hard on his heels. The door to the sub-cellar lay just ahead; he wrenched at the handle, but it did not give.

__

"Alohomora," he tried, and wrenched it again. It didn't budge. He kicked it above the lock, then attempted the wand again. "_Alohomora! Alohomora_, you son-of-a-_bitch!"_ The hinges were caked with years of orange rust, as was the lock. It probably wasn't even locked at all, only stuck tight. 

"Fine then!" He pointed the wand. _"Reducto!"_

The door fragmented and blew inward.

There in the corner was the door, open, just as Evensong had promised. Harry had never been so grateful to see an open door in his life. He went through it, and the world seemed to twist. 

Through a law of physics he would never understand, found himself running out the same way, into the same sub-cellar. He almost turned back, confused and terrified that he might have somehow gotten turned around in the short passage and was actually running toward Severus. This sub-cellar, however, contained Evensong, who threw her arms out wide and caught him before his blind fear and momentum could send him barrelling into the wall. She spun around with him, lessening his speed before letting him crash into a soft heap of burlaps sacks.

Her white hair lifted nearly straight from her head. "Stay behind me, Harry, and for the Lady's sake--"

He was coming through the passage now, they could both hear him.

__

"--cover your ears!"

Severus stepped through the passage, Hogwarts robes swirling about his feet. His attention went first to Harry and then to the more immediate threat of the banshee. His wand came out. Evensong inhaled deeply, her eyes turning from grey to red and back again and her unbound hair swirling in a blinding cloud around her, just as Snape came down the stairs into the sub-cellar.

Harry was conscious enough to think that this should really be interesting.

Whatever ungodly sound she might have been preparing died at the sight of Snape. "What are you doing?"

Without pause Severus fired at her, shouting, "_Avada kevadra!_"

There was a flash of unbearable green lightning, streaking down from nowhere, centring on Evensong. Her whole body flashed emerald-bright, seemingly from within, her outline burning brilliant white through the thick velvets she wore. The face Harry knew melted, caved in on itself, and all that was left was a wild-haired, red-eyed banshee. Snape screamed something--it might have been her name, Harry couldn't be sure. Things were piling one after the other, and nothing felt quite real. He found himself crawling to Evensong's side, barely aware that he was doing it.

Her mouth opened wide, as if trying to scream, but nothing came out but a dry, feeble croak. She was still alive. "Severus." 

Neither of them heard her. For the longest time--longer than a minute--the two men stared each other down, black eyes to black. It was unbearable to watch, wondering or perhaps even knowing exactly what both of them were thinking, watching cogs turn, attacks forming and failing in their minds. 

"Paradox?" Severus asked at last.

"Paradox," Snape assured.

Severus raised his wand. Snape did the same. Harry felt cold all over, trembling beyond even the Cruciatus curse. The implications of all this soared past him. If they duelled, whichever one of them took the worse of it didn't matter. If Snape killed Severus, he would be killed. If Severus killed Snape . . . . 

They were using the same wands. He knew what happened when two brother wands met in a duel; what would happen if the same wand, with the same wielder, was forced to match itself?

The minute Evensong cried out, he knew she'd seen it too. Somehow she made it to her feet, her commanding voice ringing out in the tiny room. "_Severus, stop!_" 

She was talking to the man but both of them turned around, the younger as if in shock. Now Harry knew how the younger Snape must have felt when he said the Potters were multiplying. 

Snape recovered first, snapping his attentions back to the other one. "_Crucio!_"

It hit him full-force, straight on--a blazing ray of dark, ugly scarlet. The sight of it seared Harry's good eye; he buried his face in the dark of the sacks, but that single streak remained on the inside of his eyelid. _Twice in my life now that's happened to me_, he thought, and shuddered. 

The force knocked Severus backwards, almost into the passageway. His eyes rolled back in their sockets, all the way back to the whites, and his head tilted backwards.

Snape was at his side, his hand on Harry's shoulder. "Potter, are you all right?"

"Uh, no." Without warning he felt as if he were going to be sick. He retched loudly, coughed, then spat out a slimy lump of something blackish which left a taste in his mouth like wet copper. He couldn't look at it long without feeling sick. "No, definitely not all right."

"We'll have you out of here in a minute. Don't move. Yvaine?" When she didn't respond, he grabbed her by the arms and shook her frantically. _"Yvaine?" _

"I'm here, Severus. I'm all right. Stunned a bit."

"I shouldn't doubt it. I need you to help me. We've got to get him back down the passage before it closed again."

Slouched in the passageway, Severus's eyes came back down. They focused on Snape, and with a catlike swipe grabbed his wand off the floor.

"Snape, he's got his wand!" Harry shouted. Knees tripping over his own robes, he fumbled for his wand, aiming it at the chest of the monster in black robes. At the same moment, Evensong's powerful voice pealed like the tolling of the tower bells. "_Drop it!_" Somehow both of them were a fraction of a second too late.

"_Avada--_"

"Probably a really bad idea for a seventh year to try that one. Especially twice in a night." 

Dumbledore stood at the top of the stairs. 

Harry didn't look at him; his focus was still on Severus. He didn't know what he was going to say until it came out. _"Reducto!"_

There was a concussive blast, deafening in the small space. 

Snape fell to the floor.

And Evensong let out a howl to rouse the dead.


	13. Three Questions

THIRTEEN

Harry had spend a great deal of time coming to in the infirmary wing. This time he almost knew where he was before he woke up, simply by the feel of the sheets. Part of his face was swollen, feverish, as if the skin were about to burst open from the inside like a rotten piece of fruit, but expert fingers gently rubbed something that felt like damp, fine sand over his cheek and temple and the burned part of his scalp. It was blessedly cool, and the coolness sank into his flesh, numbing the pain.

He opened his right eye--the left was too painful--and the room swam to meet him in a haze. He thought of his glasses and remembered that the lens was gone, which made him uneasy; ever since he could remember his glasses were the first thing he reached for in the morning. It made him vulnerable to be without them. The careful, cooling touch on his face went on and on, a single, continuous pattern of interlocking circles. 

Trying to focus, he saw only someone tall and dark, too fuzzy to make out, but the smell of cinnamon filled his senses. He knew at once who was there.

"What are you doing?"

"Scalesafe." Snape sounded amused. "I do hope you did well on this. It was more than a grade."

"Do I look bad?"

"You'll look a little odd while the skin grows back. I wouldn't be making any plans for the Yule Ball, if I were you."

"The Yule Ball's over."

"No. The Yule Ball's in two days. Dumbledore reset things a bit."

"What happened?"

"You did. That Reductor Curse of yours pushed him back down the passageway just as he was going at me with another spell."

He barely remembered firing off the Reductor Curse. The last thing that stood out clearly was that Severus had come for Snape with the death curse--or tried to, until Dumbledore appeared. Somewhere in his mind, his ears still rang with Evensong's last, piercing scream.

"Where's Professor Evensong?"

"Hiding under her own cloak somewhere. Her pride's going to be her downfall. She won't let me near enough to see her. As if she's the only woman on Earth who's never let herself be seen in public without her face on."

"And you?"

"Would you please be quiet, Potter? I do have other things to do rather than satisfy your every curiosity."

He wouldn't answer. Harry had not expected him to do. "How did you know things would work out like this?"

"Dumbledore will no doubt explain things to you. As soon as you are capable of standing on your own feet again, he's called the three of us up for a conference, which is Dumbledore's phrase for a situation where we all crowd into his office and he screams at us for a good hour." From the way he said this last it sounded as if he had been subjected to quite a lot of conferences already. "Now put your head down and let me do my work."

Harry shut his good eye and relaxed, shuttering as the burn faded. 

"Did you love her?" he asked.

Snape paused. His hand lifted from Harry's face for an instant. Then the circles started up again.

"Yes," he said finally. "I suppose I very much did."

* * *

"By now," said Dumbledore quietly, "I should hope that everyone knows that they have each been very stupid, each of you in your own exceptional way."

There was a bandage over the left side of Harry's face, with a new pair of glasses resting uncomfortably on top of it. Evensong's hood was drawn to her chin. Snape looked humiliated, and the saucer Dumbledore had provided him overflowed with cigarette ash.

"The clock for this version of Hogwarts," Dumbledore continued, "has been set back four days. _Four days. _This is not an offence I am willing to take lightly."

Snape spoke at last. "The flow was changed, Albus. Something had to be done to stop it."

"Bloody hell, Severus!" Dumbledore was on his feet, roaring, angrier than Harry had seen him since the horrible night of Cedric had died, the night Voldemort returned to power. "So you took the matter on yourself? For what? Your cussed pride? You of all the teachers in this school shouldn't be dealing with the flow. You're on the verge of paradox as it stands!"

"Headmaster--" Harry began.

"Harry, please understand that I mean this in the kindest of all possible ways. _Shut up." _He turned his full force back to Snape. "I don't think I have a word for what I want to call you. Irresponsible isn't even close. You came near to destroying everything I've struggled to maintain in this school. The flow was nearly closed; the balance has been disordered. At the very least do you comprehend the sheer amount of _paperwork _I'll be subjected to in the next few months? I have four days to account for, and a school full of innocent and totally oblivious students. The Ministry's going to be breathing down my neck for _years_."

"And they won't be breathing down mine?" Snape replied hotly. "Just let me sign my resignation now, Albus. I'd much rather go through you than through them. They're going to think I planned all this."

"Severus, when you came to me saying that an attack was due on Potter some time this year, I held in good faith that you had told me the entire story. It would have been much easier if you'd been more specific. Right now I wouldn't even give you the pleasure of getting sacked."

Evensong raised her hand timidly, almost like a student being called on in class, but Dumbledore turned full force on her. She never had a chance to get a word in before she was besieged.

"And _you_, Yvaine--you should have come directly to me. I was willing to turn a blind eye to you and Snape carrying on a relationship under my nose, but this is a completely unjustifiable infringement of your duties as a teacher and your position to _defend this school_." Each word was pronounced with a hard thump against his desk. Evensong's face lowered still further, disappearing behind her hood. "This is your last year at Hogwarts. You will leave at the end of this term. And you can rest assured that if you gain employment elsewhere, this incident will follow you. Seems I owe the Weasley twins some money."

Harry snorted.

Dumbledore shut Harry off with a furious gaze from behind his half-moon glasses. "Don't start laughing yet, Mister Potter, your turn is coming."

"Albus, I talked her into it. I won't have her losing her job at my instigation."

"Your instigation, Severus, and your opinion, mean exactly the same to me at this moment, which is to say they mean next to nothing. Yvaine, you are not a child. You knew where your responsibilities lay, and you disregarded them. You will leave Hogwarts at the end of the year."

A heavy finality hung in the air. Dumbledore fell silent, glaring stonily at both of the professors. Evensong shook visibly beneath her heavy cloak, and her breath had that shuddery, shaky quality that made Harry think she was trying not to cry. 

"So why bring Potter into it?" Snape said quietly.

"Harry is here to be threatened. Harry, if word of this incident reaches the ears of any other student in this school, and that included Hermione Granger or Ron Weasley, you will be transferred to Durmstrang. No exceptions. Do you understand?"

"Yes, Headmaster." 

Dumbledore returned to his seat behind the desk, straightening his glasses and smoothing back his white hair from his eyes. Some of the warmth returned to his face. "Now, I believe, you will be allowed to ask any three questions that come to mind. You deserve that much explanation. No more than three, please."

The first question was easy. He'd spent his entire night in the infirmary phrasing it. "How did Professor Snape know in advance about my going to the other Hogwarts?"

"Severus? I believe you'd better answer that one."

"I remembered it. But I also retained the memory of how that particular year at Hogwarts had originally taken place. Two discordant memories led me to believe that the flow had been changed."

Harry shoved his chair backwards in frustration. "Well, that clears _that_ up. I think I deserve another question, Headmaster."

"Perhaps I can clarify." Dumbledore refolded his hands on top of his messy desk blotter. "There are several possible histories of Hogwarts, Harry. In some of them, I don't exist; in some of them, you don't exist. However, Professor Snape is a special case. He exists here in this time, but he has had to live a section of this timeline twice over. He exists in paradox."

"Well, that clears _that_ up," said Snape, lounging in his chair. "You're confusing _me_, Albus, and I'm the one living through this chaos."

"Ask your next question, Potter. I think I might be able to make things a bit more clear."

It took him a moment to come up with another question. "Professor, you told Professor Evensong you'd been teaching at Hogwarts for sixty years. But you were student here only thirty years ago. How--"

"See?" Dumbledore beamed at Snape's unrelenting glower. "Potter's cleverer than you think, Severus. I knew he'd ask the crucial question eventually."

"Technically I didn't ask a question, Headmaster. You interrupted me. I still get two more."

Evensong seemed pleased. "I'm glad you caught that. Good for you, Potter."

"Severus, this one's for you too, it seems. I'll cut in when I'm ready."

For once, Snape seemed entirely uncertain of himself. He didn't look at Harry as he spoke. "When I came back from the Dark Lord, the Ministry was prepared to accept my confession. But they weren't about to allow me to practice magic again. Their idea for a punishment was to strip me of all power--it can be done--and turn me loose in the world as a Muggle."

Harry fixed Snape with a shrewd smile. "Not allow you within six feet of a wand, huh?"

"Yes," said Snape. "And it would have been hell. But Dumbledore decided to step in on my case." 

Dumbledore nodded. "I realised that someone with a close position to Voldemort could do us more good as a wizard. But I remembered Snape from his school days. An exceptional mind, but a tendency toward concealment. I suspected you then, Severus. There was always something about you I could never quite put a finger on. I thought you might be like some of the other students I'd known--dappling in the Dark Arts as a lark, as a status symbol--but there was no outward evidence. Seven years, and not one noticeable hint of anything more than an especially talented young man. When all the students in the school were prattling about someone turning Animagus, I assumed that that might have been your big secret. Now that I think about it, I was so concerned with you that I never even noticed Potter and his little group."

"You were not responsible for me then, Dumbledore," Snape said sharply. "And you certainly aren't responsible for me now."

"On the contrary, I am totally responsible for you. But then, you've always had a certain problem with gratitude." 

Snape withdrew into himself again.

Dumbledore went back to Harry, a queer, fixed smile on his face. Harry got the impression that Dumbledore had been dying to tell Snape off for ages, and was somewhat happy that Harry had given him the opportunity.

"I wanted to make certain that he was put somewhere where, if he did turn out to be a bad seed, he could be closely monitored. So I sent him back a few years. The war was on then. Some of the best wizards of the time were half-bloods, living in the Muggle world; they enlisted in the war effort. Beauxbatons was occupied and had gone into a state of emergency; they couldn't help us. Bride's Academy refused to do any work for England."

"There was an Unseelie invasion," Evensong said with unexpected sullenness. "Finbheara attacked at Tir-Na-Nog. Our hands were tied."

"Well, there you are," said Dumbledore. "And Durmstrang was behind the enemy lines. Hogwarts and Bride's were the only functioning wizard school in Europe at that time, and Hogwarts had no teachers. So I arranged to send them Snape."

"And it was a nightmare. I had to teach five different classes a day." Snape glared at Dumbledore. "And I _still_ couldn't get the Dark Arts job."

"And you won't. The Ministry was very clear on that. They might relent, eventually, given enough proof of your progress, but I doubt they would after all this time."

Things were coming into place so fast that it was hard to organise his thoughts. The Ministry of Magic would have to be mad to allow a former Death Eater to hold such a sensitive position. Considering all the people who has tried to get the job before--Quirrell, Crouch, both of whom had been in league Voldemort--there must be something to it that the Ministry wanted to protect. From what Harry had seen of the younger Snape, who had been only seventeen, he could understand the Ministry's decision to prevent an older, more talented Snape from getting the job he so desperately seemed to crave. 

"You sent him back to 1941," Harry said. "To replace the teachers you lost during the Blitz."

"The Muggle world and our world are not so separate. A major event like that trickles down to affect even us, and there was nothing we could do to help the Muggles with their side of the affair, not without risking public exposure."

Something dawned on Harry. "Sixty years ago would have been just about the right time for Tom Riddle to start at Hogwarts. You sent Snape back to keep an eye on him."

"Exactly. Snape took an especial interest in young Riddle. He sent back many excellent reports during the time the Chamber of Secrets was first opened. Every move Riddle made, Snape was there."

"So he could have done something to stop it."

"I'm afraid not. We can't change the past, but we can learn from it--literally, in this case. Much of what we know of Voldemort today was information received from Severus Snape in the year 1941, his first year as a professor at Hogwarts."

Harry recalled what Hermione had said. "But eventually time would have caught up with him. He would have run into himself as a student."

"When it came time that young Severus attended Hogwarts, I had Professor Snape send to Durmstrang, on a teacher's exchange programme. There were rumours that Igor Karkaroff had allied himself with Voldemort and was training students in his own school in the Dark Arts, and we needed someone there. At the time, Karkaroff had never met Snape. Snape passed himself off as an active Death Eater, still sympathetic to Voldemort's cause, and gained Karkaroff's trust. It was partly on Snape's evidence that Karkaroff was exposed and sent to Azakban. That and Moody, of course."

"Snape doesn't even like Mad-Eye Moody."

"Espionage make for some very strange bedfellows," Snape muttered. "So. I retain two sets of memories. One for the time I really was attending Hogwarts, and another for the time I was sent back. When the memory altered, I knew something must have happened to effect the flow and that there was a risk of a temporal paradox. It only took me a while to figure out just what. When I knew, I acted to prevent both your getting hurt and the greater risk of causing damage of damaging the structure of history." 

Snape stubbed his cigarette in the saucer and lit another, raking his limp hair back as he exhaled the smoke. "You have one more question, Potter, and then like it or not, I'm going to bed. This conversation has taken about twenty years longer than I expected, and I need rest if I'm going to have to put up with Neville Longbottom and his idiot sister blowing up my classroom in the morning." 

Trouble was, he couldn't think of a single thing to add. "How did I get into the other Hogwarts?"

Snape's eyes flashed at Dumbledore. "Albus? You're up."

"The Memorial Yearbook Shelf," said Dumbledore, "contains volumes from each of the timelines that run through Hogwarts. About seven, all told. But the passageway is only triggered if two books are pulled at once. Then the passage opens to the time of the second book. I thought of that when I installed it. Didn't you notice, Harry, that all of the Yearbooks seem to be the same, uninteresting colour? Books that the eye passes over without remark?"

"One of your more brilliant ideas?"

"I like to think so, yes."

"It didn't work," Harry told him grimly.

"It usually does. We've had students come through the library before, looking for pictures of parents or older siblings in their school days, but Irma Pince always finds the correct edition for them. Oh, we've had occasions where students will pull two books and wander off--not really a problem, unless they wind up in the Plague years--but Irma's always been there to fetch them out before they cause too much trouble. And as far as I know, nobody's ever broken into the library in the middle of the night to steal a Yearbook. Books of love potions and sexual education texts, yes, but never a _Yearbook_." 

"What about the cloak?" Harry shouted suddenly. At this all three teachers turned to stare. Snape put his hand to his forehead and groaned, but Harry wasn't particularly interested in Snape's approval. 

Dumbledore held up a finger. "Ah, Harry. You've had three questions, and three should be enough for anyone, I think."

"Begging your pardon, Headmaster," said Evensong, a little too sweetly. "He's had only two yet. Remember? You interrupted him in the middle of one."

Snape looked as if he would like to strangle her. She smiled and patted the back of his hand. Snape jerked himself away and lit up another cigarette, smoking it in rough, fast puffs. 

"What about my father's Cloak of Invisibility?" Harry said again, insistently.

"It's safe, Harry. I've got it locked away, somewhere." Under the beard, Dumbledore's mouth pursed. "Somewhere. I'll have to figure out just where before the year's up. Fawkes, have you any idea where I might have put Mister Potter's cloak?"

Fawkes gave a mystified squawk. Harry could have sworn he saw the phoenix shrug a wing-joint.

"I dropped it. When Lucius and S . . . Sev--" The old taboo against calling a professor by his given name was too strong. He jerked a thumb at Snape and went on. "--And one of him were chasing me. I left it in the passageway."

"Oh, that _is_ an interesting story." Dumbledore folded his hands on his desk and leaned forward, settling in. Harry heard Snape mumble something with the word 'windbag' in it. Evensong shifted in her chair. Fawkes shook his head mournfully. 

"As I recall, Uriah Heep--Slytherin's prefect at the time--caught wind of a disturbance on that particular night. He went to investigate, but found a Blocking Spell on the passage. He called for Slytherin's headmistress, Johanna Vane, God rest her, to break it, but by the time she did there was nothing left but some bloodstains on the floor. We tried for weeks to figure out what had happened, but all the Slytherins had banded together and weren't talking. All Vane ever found was the cloak, which she gave to me. I knew your father owned such a thing, but he never came to claim it, and he graduated afterwards. So I kept it." Dumbledore smiled. "Then when you arrived at Hogwarts, I decided to he would have liked for you to have it. A souvenir of the old marauding days."

Harry suddenly felt very tired. He wanted a bed. He wanted all these adult eyes off him, so that he could think this over. The past night was a jumble of nightmarish impressions, and the only image he wanted to keep of it was the memory of his father, grinning and giving him the thumbs-up.

"Since you're all keen on explaining things, Albus," said Snape, "I wish you'd explain something to me. Every since I realised my memory had changed, I've been calculating exactly when the attack on Potter would come, so that I would be there before anything happened. Everything added up to next week. Yvaine and I thought that we had enough time to prepare, so what happened?"

Dumbledore folded his arms over his beard and rocked his chair with what could have only been a twinkle in his eye. "Leap Year."

Snape's mouth fell open. "Leap Year?" Then he was on his feet, palms flat on the desk, pushing into Dumbledore's bemused face and roaring, "_Leap Year?_"

"About thirty years worth of Leap Years, actually," said Dumbledore thoughtfully, as Snape, staggered to speechlessness, fell back into his chair. "The solar year obeys the sun; Hogwarts' school schedule does not. Severus, do you never take a look at that calendar I gave you for Christmas?" 

Evensong seemed to choke. At once she covered her face with her hands and bowed her head to her lap, making a stifled, strangling noise. For a moment Harry thought she was sobbing with disappointment, until she threw back her hood and howled, tears of laughter streaming down her face, unabashedly pounding her thighs with her fists. "Lord, what fools these mortals be!" 

That was the best part of a sorry business. Even back in the infirmary, his face stinging, and with a weird, crackly stretch in his side as his broken ribs slowly knitted together, Harry would occasionally whisper, "Leap Year," to himself and chuckle. As tired as he was, he fell asleep smiling.


	14. The Black Bishop

FOURTEEN

Ron threw himself at the seat across the lunch table. He was in a panic, his red hair standing up in spikes, and the whites showing all around his eyes. "Harry, you've got to help me, I've just done something awful."

"Wait." Harry finished chewing his bite of sandwich and swallowed, while holding up a hand for patience. When his mouth was empty, he took both of Ron's hands in his own and spoke in a clear, soothing voice while looking directly into his friend's eyes. "Listen, Ron. Take Hermione to the Ball. I'll go with you, if you like. You'll have a lovely time. If a waltz comes on, dance with her. Don't worry about her being taller. And if any snogging goes on, don't tell George."

He sipped his grape juice as Ron gazed gratefully at him, as if he were some sort of god. Just as suddenly, Ron flinched, put his fingertips to his temples, and shook his head rapidly as if to clear his ears.

Harry put down his mug. "Ron? Is something the matter?"

"No." Ron sat down, looking less panicky than before, but still bewildered. "Nothing's the matter. I just got the weirdest feeling of deja-vu."

* * *

Dumbledore had told him it was understandable if he wanted to miss classes the next few days, but winter exams were coming up and a day missed in Pontifus's class could mean a whole grading letter lost. He felt haunted, stumbling among the students, going through the motions of displaying interest. If he could have only told Ron what had really happened, that would be something, but the story Dumbledore had given out was entirely different. The day after he'd been released from the infirmary wing, George Weasley came to thank Harry for getting attacked by vampire bats on the top floor, as the twins had finally been able to collect on some bets. 

Potions was the worst. Snape's eyes deliberately skipped over Harry for whole classes at a time, and yet he would occasionally look up from chopping herbs to find the man staring at him. They had not spoken since Dumbledore's office. Harry almost missed the old days of Snape's unremitting fault-finding and ridicule. This total silence unnerved him. As long as Snape wasn't saying anything, Harry was left to speculate what might be going on his mind, and Snape's mind was not a place Harry fancied visiting.

He had no appetite for lunch. Instead, he retired to the Commons with a book, a mug of tea, and a few slices of toast. Ron and Hermione gave up eating in favour of keeping him company. Unfortunately, Ron's method of keeping him company seemed to involved driving him completely around the twist at a time when Harry would much rather be alone, puzzling out what was troubling him. 

"I've got one," Ron said now. "What do you get when you cross You-Know-Who and a Tarantallegra Spell?"

Harry gave a pained sigh. "I don't know, Ron, what?"

"The Dark Lord of the Dance!" He concluded this with by putting his arms down stiff at his sides and attempting a bit of Irish step-dancing, but halted in mid-Michael Flatley. "You don't get it."

"I got it. I just didn't find it funny."

Hermione only looked embarrassed.

"Ooh, someone sounds a bit Snape-ish today. All right, I've got another. A troll, a hag, and a leprechaun all walk into a bar--"

_Someone might have sounded a lot more Snape-ish if circumstance had had its way,_ Harry considered saying. Under his cloak he found the bruise and pressed it hard enough to silence the roving, ugly thoughts.__

"What's wrong, Harry?" asked Hermione, thankfully cutting short Ron's next joke. "You've been acting this way for days. Has anyone been bothering you about the bandage?"

"Just the usual bit with Draco Malfoy asking me why they didn't cover up the rest of my face while they were at it, but I expected that," he said. "No offence, but could you two clear off for a moment? I'm trying to think."

"You've been driving yourself mad trying to think," said Hermione gently. "You've been trying to think for a week, ever since you got hurt. I wish you would tell us what happened. Was it Snape?"

"Yes," said Harry. "And no."

It was Snape, of course, but there was something else there. It almost felt like the black spot all over again: something too dense to think around, like a wall in his vision. The black spot was gone; his memory was his own again. There were too many things to consider, like pieces scattered around a chessboard. Ron was the chess expert around here; he would have known what to do. 

He remembered something Ron had told him once about chess. When the board got too busy, whenever you were under attack from too many directions, picture the playing field as perfectly clear save for one man, then tackle the problem without distraction. 

He closed his eyes and conjured the image of a chessboard. One piece stood alone on the black-and-red field. The black bishop. Snape. 

For some reason, though, another figure kept intruding: a white queen standing directly across from the bishop. Harry tried to banish her from his thoughts, but the queen kept returning until he realised who she must be. Evensong. This whole mess had started with the two of them.

Bishops could move an unlimited number of squares, but only slantwise. Queens could move in any direction, as far as they wanted, but still they had a few rules. What rules did Evensong move by?

"Ron," he said, with his eyes still shut. "My bishop on King's Knight's fifth, White's queen on King's Bishop's second. What should I do?"

Ron sounded a bit surprised at the question, but his response was unerring. "Move your man. She's going to take him."

Everything fell together. He'd been so frustrated over the missing pieces of the puzzle that he had neglected the ones he held. Like a cog slipping into a groove, the pieces clicked rapidly and spelled out what he'd been missing all along. 

"She never took it off," he whispered.

Hermione comprehended at once. "Evensong never took off your Repellment? How do you know?"

Harry opened his eyes and looked at her. "Because she _can't do a Repellment._ She doesn't know any magic that comes out of books; she said so herself. That's why she took the Dark Arts position: it was the only thing she could teach. And not me--_Snape_. When Snape was treating my face in the infirmary, one of my eyes was swollen shut and I didn't have my glasses for the other one, but I knew who he was almost before I woke up because he still smelled of cinnamon. Evensong took off his Repellment days ago, yet when she took it off me, both of you knew it at once."

"Why would she take yours off and leave his on?" asked Ron.

"Probably because I'd already asked her, flat-out, if she was a _baobhan sith_. She didn't want me to get anymore suspicious, and she didn't want Snape remembering any details that might set him up." 

His thoughts were whizzing. Evensong had lied to Snape about the Repellment. The key was still on him. But he still thought she had taken it off, which could only mean she . . . he didn't know what it could mean, only that Evensong must have something to gain by misleading him. "Hermione, do you still have Advanced Practical Potions left for the day?" 

She nodded. 

"When you go to the supply cupboard, there's a jar there labelled 'Seal's Fat'. Slip it into your sleeve pocket and bring it back here. And for God's sake, don't let Snape find out that you know anything; she's still got a link with him. Ron, when you get to Magical Creatures, ask Hagrid if there's a rowan tree anywhere on the grounds. If there is, find it and bring back a stick about the size of your wrist."

"The laying ceremony?" said Ron.

"Yes. And get me a piece of string. And your quill-knife."

Ron went off to fetch the quill-knife from their dorm-room. When he was gone, Harry licked his forefinger and thumb and pinched out the stub of candle on the table. He squashed the warm wax in his fist, then began to tear off lumps about half the size of his thumb. He rolled one against the flat cover of a book until it formed a smooth white cone. When it was finished, he started on the next. When she saw what he was doing, Hermione took a bit of wax and began to help.

"Beeswax earplugs, that's how Odysseus's crew made it past the sirens," said Harry to her as he worked. "Seals are incredibly sacred to Faerie creatures. There's even a kind of Faerie that can change into a seal, I remember that from Magical Creatures. I'm hoping that coating these with a layer of seal's fat will keep us from getting lured in by Evensong." 

When Ron returned with the quill-knife, there were seven small cones lined up on the table, and Harry was rolling out a eighth. Wordlessly he put the knife on the edge before Harry. 

"Where's the string?" Harry asked.

Ron paused for a moment, then reached down the front of his robes. Around his neck on a longish bit of string he wore a Muggle fifty-pence piece with a hole bored through it. Harry had given it to him ages ago during their first Christmas at Hogwarts. He hadn't known Ron would hold on to that pitiful coin for so long, but now was no time to wax sentimental. Ron drew the string from the 50p. and laid it before Harry.

"That string's been over my heart for six years now," said Ron. "Maybe it'll be lucky."

"I hope so," said Harry, setting the string aside. No one was coming; everyone was already in classes. He put his left arm across the table, rolled up his sleeve, and with his right hand picked up the small, sharp blade. 

"Harry, no!" Ron snatched the knife, thrusting out his own bare arm. "Take it from me, instead."

Harry shook his head, taking up the quill-knife again. "No offence, Ron, but virgin's blood works tends to be best for spell-casting."

Hermione's eyes grew huge. "Ron isn't a--"

"Long story," mumbled Ron. 

Harry drew the sharp blade in a fast, shallow slash over the thick part of his arm, just beneath the crook of the elbow. The wound stayed clear, then began to seep watery pink fluid--not nearly enough. Gritting his teeth, he made a second, deeper cut over the first, hissing as the wound gaped like a mouth and fresh blood ran immediately down his forearm, pooling in the cup of his palm. Hermione and Ron watched, Ron with his hand on Harry's shoulder, Hermione with her fingers knotted together and her teeth frantically working her bottom lip.

He bundled up the thread, pressing first one side, then the other, to the cut, until the white string soaked red. "I hope that's enough. Fix me up, Hermione."

Hermione drew her wand from her inner pocket. "_Haematoma finis_." 

The blood stopped and the cut shrivelled to a thin brown scab.

"That's all we can do, until we get the rest of the materials," said Harry grimly, pushing his glasses up to the bridge of his nose. Hermione handed him a handkerchief, and he sponged the still-wet blood away. "I hope we don't have to use all this. She seems agreeable. She may listen to reason. But I'd hate to go looking for her and have something go wrong with us totally defenceless." He handed a pair of earplugs to Hermione, one to Ron, and put the last two pairs in his own breast pocket under his Gryffindor crest. "Go on to classes. I'll be right behind."

Wordlessly they both headed to the portal. Harry returned to his room. Scanning his bookshelf, he found the volume that Sirius had sent to him--what seemed like ages ago, though it was hard to tell since time had gotten so slippery--and opened it. Sirius's note fell out from between the pages. He had hoped that the book would be informative, but what Harry needed wasn't the book. Just the bookmark, with its embossed stars and its string of tiny gold bells. 

_The noise of various small chimes does distract the beast, and make it to lose its bearings . . . ._

He snatched the ribbon marker and hurried to catch up to Ron.

* * *

McGonagall had already sent the prefect on the midnight room-watch. The common room was still. Ron let the rowan stake tumble onto the table; he'd already sharpened it. Harry bound the stiffened string to the bottom, just above the raw wood, and grimly wound it as far as he could before tying it off. Hermione groused to herself as she dipped her fingers in the greasy, fishy-smelling contents of a small stone jar and smeared the substance over the earplugs.

"Can't believe we're sneaking out in the stony dark to murder a professor in her own bedroom," she mumbled. "This is the sort of thing they kick you out of school for, Harry."

"You've really got to get your priorities in order," said Ron.

"I hope we won't have to," said Harry. "I hope she'll listen to reason and make herself scarce. I don't want to murder anyone. But better her dead than Snape."

"Yeah. He still hasn't given us our test grades back." Ron caught Harry's glare and held up his hands. "Jesus, Potter! I was only trying to add a little levity. Be honest, I think I'm going to shit myself from pure fear."

"Me too," Harry admitted. 

Hard at work, Hermione said, "Me three." She stood up at last. "That's the last of them. Careful with these, they're a little slickery."

They put the earplugs in their pockets, with Harry taking the extra pair, then stood looking at each other for what seemed a very long time. There was nothing left to say. 

Quietly, Harry turned and went out the portal hole. Ron and Hermione followed.

When they finally reached Evensong's room, the door was slightly ajar, and the oil lamp was lit, but there was no professor. Harry looked at Ron, who shrugged. "Best try her offices, then."

But the office was empty as well. Hermione was slowly growing more and more anxious with each anticlimax. Her teeth worked her bottom lip with a frantic intensity. "This is impossible. She's not in her offices, she's not in the professors wing. What's next? Does the gang split up and search for clues, Harry? If we do, I'm taking the Great Dane."

"Hush up, Hermione. There's no need for sarcasm. Let me think."

He leaned against the stone wall, trying to come up with a plan that might work. Nothing sprang immediately to mind, but the lurking temptation to give up was very strong. If Dumbledore still had her roving the school looking for intruders, then she might be anywhere; they'd never find her. And if they got caught out of their dorms, there would never be another chance. 

Just as he was about to call things off, a round, wide-mouthed, semi-opaque face suddenly pushed through the wall next to him. It leered grotesquely, rolling its eyes. Harry jumped back, just as Peeves glided into the hallway, screaming at the top of his metaphysical lungs. 

"Students in the halls after hours! Students breaking into the teachers offices! Coo-_wee_, but this is a great night! First them two, and now you." He rubbed his nearly transparent palms together in glee and singsonged in an I'm-the-king-of-the-castle voice. "I'm gonna _te-ell!_ I'm gonna _te-ell!_"

They froze. At the same time, Harry and Hermione opened their mouths to plead with him--the worst thing one could try with Peeves--just as Ron rolled his eyes and yawned. "What is it with you lately, Peeves? I thought you got _all_ the good gossip."

"Gossip?" Peeves floated up to Ron's eye level, craning his neck in anticipation. "What gossip? Where's some gossip? I haven't had any good gossip since Malfoy and his tart turned up in the top floor with the bats."

Ron's whole face was a shrewd, bored blank. "Well, if _you _haven't heard already, maybe it's not such good gossip after all." 

To their absolute shock, Ron turned and began to amble off down the hall, with Peeves drifting in back of him like a dog slobbering for a treat. 

Ron called to the two of them, "Come on, you lot. It's probably not worth it."

Harry looked at Hermione, who was obviously as clueless as he was. They followed after him uncertainly.

Peeves was still begging. He threw himself to the floor and grabbed the trailing hem of Ron's cloak. Since Peeves didn't weigh anything, Ron kept going, dragging a kicking, whining Peeves along the floor behind him. Finally Ron stopped, spinning around hard enough to send Peeves crashing into the wall. Unlike Evensong, Peeves apparently still thought he was corporeal.

Ron bent down so as to be on the same altitude as the stunned little man. He propped one arm on his bent knee and conferred such a malicious, significant grin that Harry wouldn't have though it possible if he hadn't been there to see it.

"How would you like to help us really _get _Professor Snape?" Ron asked Peeves.

Peeves jumped to his feet. "Hell, yeah!" He started bouncing up and down. "Snakey Snape, let's do it, how do we get him?" Suddenly he paused, eyes narrowing. "And his snooty creepy floatie-along girlfriend, too?"

"Both of them," Ron assured. He cupped his hand around Peeves ear, but his eyes glinted sidelong to Harry and Hermione. "There's a rule against teachers having romantic relationships here at Hogwarts, Peeves. If we can catch Snape alone with his girl, we can sound the alert to the other professors, and both of them will be booted out faster than you can say 'Nettlesby Ruling'. All we need to know is where she might have gotten off to." 

Harry suddenly caught where all this was heading, and he mentally he cheered Ron on. For the second time recently, Ron had just been brilliant. 

"Wouldn't you like to hold that one over the Bloody Baron?" Ron went on devilishly. "Wouldn't you just like to see the look on his smarmy face when he hears that the head of his house has been kicked out for fooling around on the side with another teacher?"

"Yes!" Peeves burst into life. "Yes, take that, Bloody Baron, they went off down toward the Forest, I saw them through the window, they were heading into the Forest!"

"Bloody hell, she's taken him into the Forest." Harry dragged Ron away from Peeves. "Thanks, Peeves, we'll let you know what happens!"

They left Peeves cavorting as they rushed down the third floor passage to the balcony. Down the stairs and across the pale-blue, snowy glow of the Quidditch field, and finally emerging on the back grounds near the Forbidden Forest, Harry finally halted them with an outstretched arm. Breathing was hard and painful, the recently healed spot on his rib insistently reminding him of its presence.

"How are we going to find them in the Forest, Harry?" Ron asked.

"We won't have to. If she's got him there alone, she'll start singing--finishing what she started."

"And the singing will draw us right to her," said Hermione. "And if she doesn't?"

"If she doesn't, we'll know they're just off on another midnight stroll. We go back inside, and we leave them to each other. Be quiet. We have to listen."

In the shadow of the haunted chapel, the crescent moon a dim, pale smile in the clear sky above, the three of them waited. Harry's heart pounded in counterpoint to his bandaged ribs. The _ferula _had mended the broken bones, but the enormous black bruise was still tender and painful. A low wind stirred up the powdery snow and it seemed a very long wait before absolute stillness reigned.

__

Hushabye . . . don't you cry . . . go to sleep my little baby . . . when you wake . . . you'll have sweet cake . . . and all the pretty little horses . . . .

Harry looked around. Tears were streaking down Hermione's cheeks, and her shoulders shook silently, just as Harry's had that first night when he heard his mother singing. Ron looked frantically, half in fear, half in wonder, from the Forest to Hermione, as if he somehow expect the voice to be coming from her. 

"Come on," said Harry. "We'll find them now. Just remember your earplugs.

Ron reached out for Hermione's hand. When he spoke, his voice was gruff, as if he too had been crying. "You going to be all right?"

Hermione wiped her face on the edge of her sleeve, then blew her nose. She nodded, her back stiff and her eyes unfeasibly clear, like hard pinpricks of light in her face. She took his offered hand, and the three of them started forward like children in a fairy tale, into the Forbidden Forest. In the dark, the tall row of poplars at the edge looked like the black iron bars of a waiting cage.


	15. Into the Forest

FIFTEEN

The song sank like a hook into each of them, drawing them down the trodden paths where Hagrid made his rounds, and then deeper, where there was no light and no clear way to follow. It was not even necessary to look around to know which way to go. Harry advanced in the lead, zeroing in on the sound of his mother's voice. 

__

Blacks and bays . . . dapples and greys . . . coach, and six-a little horses . . . . 

There was a slight pause behind him when Hermione got caught in bramble. Harry saw it out of the corner of his eye, but couldn't bring himself to turn to help. Ron went to release her, but she was so fixed on whatever she was hearing that she didn't seem to notice the tears in her cloak or the scratches on her legs. Soon the song grew so loud it was not even necessary to strain to hear it. Beyond the trees, a large patch radiated a cold glow--moonlight on a snowy clearing.

"I . . . didn't expect it to be like this, Harry." Hermione's voice trembled.

"Put your plugs in, then. You don't have to go." He still couldn't turn his head to see her; it was as if his neck had locked into position, forcing him to stare only at that bright opening between the trees.

She wiped her wet face again. "I'll be all right. We've got to go on." She stuck out her arm again. "Hold my hand, Ron."

He took it without seeing it. "They're in that meadow, aren't they, Harry?" Ron sounded nothing like himself--his voice was deeper somehow, older, more like his brother Percy's voice than his own.

"Yes. Come on. Earplugs ready, both of you." Under his cloak he fumbled for the sharp rowan stake. 

_This is the second time a Potter's saved your life, Snape. I hope you appreciate it this time around._

Harry stepped into the clearing and stood there blinking and shielding his eyes from the glare. Even as faint as the moon was tonight, it was dazzling on the snowy field, made worse by his eyes adjusting to the dimness in the Forest. He could feel Hermione and Ron behind him, their hands still locked, but he still couldn't turn to see them.

Evensong kneeled in the snow, her white hair floating, her garb an even cleaner white than the field around her. Snape's dark head lay in her lap. Between them, a black, terrible mist gathered, seeming to emerged from every hole in Snape's face, and Evensong had gathered herself close to him, close enough to kiss. The blackness drained from him to her, and she fed on it like water. 

The frightful buzzing feeling of the scar made the hairs on Harry's arm lift, and the song grew louder and louder in his ears. Unconsciously, he took a step forward, then another, and another. After the first one he tried to stop, frantically telling himself it was murder, it was suicide, but unable to prevent his own legs from taking one step after another. He was walking full speed, unable to control it.

"Harry!" Hermione shouted over the song. "Earplugs!"

Still moving forward fast, almost at a run as he drew closer, he fumbled in his breast pocket and slapped the first earplug in. The feeling faded instantly. With the other plug in place, something strange happened: suddenly he could still hear the night wind, the forest sounds, could even hear Snape's shattered breathing, but the song vanished.

"_Yvaine, stop!_"

Her head jerked up; her wide, frightened eyes bulged, vividly grey. At the same time, the music in Harry's head faded away, and he found himself in the middle of the field, facing her. Slowly her hair fell down to her shoulders. The dark cloud broke apart and blew away like smoke.

"Harry?" She shifted herself, carefully lowering Snape to the ground as she stood. The winter wind caught her white cloak as she came forward, her hands lifting toward him. "Why did you--"

His hand closed around the stake in his pocket and gripped it tight. "We translated the laying ceremony. We know how to get rid of you. We brought everything we needed. Now get away from Snape."

She held perfectly still, poised like a deer as her eyes filled with terror. She stepped back again, away from Snape, away from Harry. "Harry. You don't want to do this now. Please, go away."

"Get away from him. Ron!" He heard Ron moving behind him, but didn't dare look away from Evensong. This time he would definitely have to watch the face rather than the body for an attack. "Check Snape. See if he's still alive." He tossed Ron the last set of plugs. "And put those in his ears."

Ron ran to Snape, put his two fingers to the side of the professor's neck, as Evensong turned back to Harry. She was breathing hard. "Don't do this. Please."

"I'm not going to do anything to you. Just go. Get out of here."

"He's okay!" said Ron from somewhere behind him. "Just cold. I think he'll come to in a minute."

Her head went up again, the old Faerie pride that would only allow her to plead for so long. "So why not? Go ahead. You've got the stake, I suppose. Here's my heart." She opened up her white cloak, parting the velvet above the swell of her breast. Suddenly he smelled cinnamon; and that vertigo feeling, the black spot, rose in his mind. She was less than a yard from him; if he'd wanted, he could lunge forward and run it into her. Inside the folds of his cloak, his hand unfolded from the stake and locked tight around something else. 

At the edge of the field Hermione cried, "Stake the bitch, Harry!"

Ron sounded close to tears. "Harry, do it!"

He whipped his hand from his pocket at last. Evensong recoiled, and Ron turned his face away as if anticipating a spout of gore, but what dangled from his fist now was a string of bright golden bells.

He shook them rapidly, pushing them into her face. The effect was immediate and terrifying: all at once her soft, pale face seemed to peel off in strips, as if it were made of nothing more than old rags, and yellow-grey flowed from her scalp to the very tips of her hair. She crouched in a ball, covering her ears, screaming something that only Hermione could probably understand.

"Are you going to leave yet?"

"Harry, put those away, for the Lady's name, and let me explain!"

He lowered his hand but didn't dare let go of the bells. 

Tears ran from Evensong's fiery red eyes. She unfolded from her tightly hunched knot, still frightened. "You were right. I don't know how you figured it out. I've been passing myself off as a true _bean sidhe_ for centuries, and so far no one's come close to guessing anything."

"She's a BBC, Harry, do it!" Ron roared.

"Quiet, Ron. Look after Snape." Inside he was shaking. "So you lied to me that night in the passage. Snape told me all of the Faerie were liars."

"Of course I lied to you. You didn't expect me to say anything in front of Severus, did you? He already mistrusted me, even though he thought I was only performing a Repellment. If he'd thought for a minute I was anything other than a banshee, he might have started putting things together, the way you seem to have done." She sounded sulky, as if it were all somehow Harry's fault.

"The only reason he didn't put anything together was because he couldn't smell the key on himself," said Harry. "I couldn't. If he had done, he would have realised you'd never taken whatever spell it was off him. Repellment or otherwise."

She took another step toward him. On his knees in the snow, Ron all but whined, "Will you please for the love of God put a stake in her, Harry? She's only trying to trick you."

She only shook her head. "No, I'm not. Not anymore. You figured out the last of it. I can't lie to you anymore." She shrugged, kicked a lump of snow at her feet, and added bitterly, "Not that I wouldn't if I were still able to . . . ."

Hermione had drawn nearer. She stood now over Snape, her hand on Ron's shoulder. Incredibly, she wore a faint smile, even though she was shivering with the cold. "True name."

Evensong nodded. "Yes, Yvaine is my true name. The only one who ever called me that was him." She nodded at Snape. "And Dumbledore. If I hadn't thought I'd be safe here, I never would have used it."

"Anyone who calls one of the Faerie by their true name can make them speak the truth," Hermione said to Harry's perplexed reaction. "It's one of the rules they live by." The smile grew a little more confident. "Found that out searching my thesis. Snape called you by your true name all the time, though; why didn't you tell him when he asked?"

"I can tell you," said Harry. "Because he never asked. Because he trusted her." 

"I saved your life on the other side, Harry! Severus would have killed you! Show some compassion."

"This is compassion. I'm giving you a chance. It's up to you."

Evensong turned her face away. It was snowing again, harder, and against the flurry Evensong's pale outlines were lost. Ron laboured to stand, brushing snow off his knees as he drew himself close behind Harry. His eyes were grave but implacable, very much resembling Dumbledore's. Hermione positioned herself on the other side of him, her wand clenched tight in her white-knuckled fist. There was an unyielding steel to her posture, one that McGonagall would have admired. 

"Snape is almost back to normal, and I wouldn't want to be you when he wakes up," said Ron coldly. "Either spill whatever you have to say or clear out of here."

"I have nothing more to say. I've done evil and there's nothing I can do to change it." As if she'd only just realised what had happened, she touched her face and drew up her hood to conceal it. Her voice was peculiar, strangled and tight. "You're all too young to know anything about trying to be something you're not. Or about wanting something you know you can't have."

"Like hell we don't know," growled Ron. "We're teenagers."

"Did you do anything else he'd like to know about?" asked Harry. "I mean, besides lie to him and lie to me and to Dumbledore and half the ruddy school and take Snape's heart and tramp on it, did you do anything else?"

Evensong was looking at Hermione, oddly enough. Hermione only stared back, intensely. "I think what Harry's trying to ask is how many years you took."

"Only seven. But I didn't--"

"Do you love him?" asked Harry. Ron's head lifted in concern, and Hermione shot a fast, frightened look at Harry.

Evensong's pale brown crinkled. "What?"

"Do you? Because when he wakes up I'm going to tell him everything I've seen, everything I've found out. We both know what kind of man he is. There won't be a place on earth you could hide if he really wanted to find you. But if you're gone by the time he comes round, I won't say a word of any of it. To anyone. Ron, Hermione, and I will leave, and let him wake up and think whatever he wants to think. Between the lot of us we've got all the material we need to kill you. Now choose."

"Spoken like a Slytherin, Potter."

Evensong clapped her hands to her mouth, trying to take back her words as she whirled to face her lover. None of them had heard him stand up. When he wanted, he could be as quiet as a cat. "Severus--"

Before the three of them could say anything, before Evensong could lift a hand to protect herself, Snape backhanded her with a loud pop that rang in the silence. She tripped over her feet, held up only by Snape's strong hold on her cloak-front. The next blow was a fist across her jaw; Evensong didn't make a sound, but she seemed to go limp as Snape's hand went back for the third time, folding into herself like a flower, sinking to the ground 

Hermione screamed, more out of shock than anything, and lunged forward as if to spring at Snape, but Ron locked his arms around her ribs and held her firm, putting his hand on Harry's back as he started in. "Don't, mate. You probably shouldn't come between this."

Harry thrust Ron out of the way and latched on to Snape's upraised arm. "Don't bloody hit her again, Snape!"

"You stay out of this!" He tried to shake Harry off. Harry braced his legs and held firm. His hands broke away from Evensong as he shoved Harry aside. 

Harry staggered, but didn't lose his feet. "Back off, Severus. Let Dumbledore handle her."

"Do you want some, too, Potter? _Stay out_." 

Without warning a large black body barrelled between Ron and Hermione. It knocked Harry to his back on the ground and leapt toward Snape's face, teeth snapping and slobber flying. For a fleeting moment Harry thought it was Sirius, but the reality was the next best substitute. It was Fang.

"What in hell's goin' on? Fang! Here!"

Fang snarled, deep in his throat, and shook Snape's arm between his jaws. Evensong crawled across the snow, laying her hands on the boarhound's muzzle, trying to pry him loose, just as Hagrid burst from between the trees. His crossbow was drawn, aimed outward. When he saw the three students, along with two professors, one of whom was pouring with blood, his bushy eyebrows shot up. He took his finger off the trigger. 

"Fang! Lay off! Harry, pull 'im off, 'fore he eats yer Potions teacher!" 

Harry yanked with all his weight on Fang's collar, falling backwards again as Evensong's sharp fist hit the dog on the muzzle. He finally released his grip, allowing Harry to pry his jaws apart. Fang lunged toward Snape, teeth snapping inches away his target. 

Snape's bleeding arm saturated his black cloak, blotching the snow. He kicked Fang's face away, cursed, used his heels to push himself backwards across the ground. The dog nearly ripped away from Harry's double-handed hold until Hermione wrapped her arms around the dog's chest. 

Hagrid rapidly assessed the wound, tore back the ragged wing of the cloak, and clamped his hand hard above Snape's elbow, thumb pressed hard to the professor's inner arm. "I sure as hell hope one of yeh brought yer wand. Goddamn dog nicked a vein."

Hermione stood forward, looking to Snape for approval. "_Haematoma finis_, Professor?" It only made sense Hermione would ask permission first.

Snape nodded, teeth clenched. He managed to extended the rapidly purpling limb. "Yes, Miss Granger. If you would."

Hagrid still looked grave. He took his not-too-clean scarf from around his neck and tied it tight around Snape's arm. "Gonna have ter get yerself to the hospital wing, it looks like, Sev. That little spell ain't gonna stop it, but it'll keep yeh from bleedin' out 'fore I get yeh back to Hogwarts."

"Don't . . . call . . . me . . . Sev."

"Sorry, Severus. C'mon." He hauled Snape to his feet easily. "One of you boys, get his other arm."

Ron looked at Harry, then went to him, throwing Snape's unhurt arm over his shoulder. Harry felt sick to the bone, unable to move from the spot. Hermione was next to Evensong, examining the cut on her cheek, holding her hands and murmuring in concern. Gradually, Evensong rose, leaning on Hermione for support. 

"Come on, all of yeh. Let's get outta this weather." He jerked his head toward Harry and said quietly, "I hate ter do this, Harry, but this is gonna have ter be reported to Dumbledore. You know that. I'm real disappointed with you lot. Yeh should know better." With the same sad, unmovable condemnation, he looked at Evensong and Snape. "You too, Professors. Sorry."


	16. Epilogue

__

Author's Note: Well, this is the last of it. Before I go, there are several people who must be thanked: **Nomad**_ for the staggeringly thorough Harry Potter Continuity Bible; _**Lauren Snape**_, for assistance above and beyond the call of duty; the other equally delightful and nasty _**Devotees of Snape **_at Lauren's Yahoo Group slytherintales; _**Caipora** _for the high flattery of telling me that I do Rowling "better than Gardner does Ian Fleming"; _**Cooper Black_, _**whose keen perception rooted out the most obscure references, and whose unfailing critical eye caught the one flaw that crushed my hopes of perfect continuity: by Harry's sixth year, the brothers Weasley would have already graduated!; **Theresa **_for the pencil sketch; _**Dr. M. Patton**_, who never expected his lecture on Spinoza's theory of time to be used in quite this way; and the best beta-readers a girl could ask for, _**Elaine, Richard, and Yolanda Parker,**_ who know everything that sadly went to the cutting room floor--Hermione's catfight with Antoinette Sangfroid (thank you, Elaine), Hagrid's extracurricular activities (thank you, Rich), and Dumbledore in a Father Christmas outfit (thank you, Yollie). Rich is now and forever my All-Purpose-Naming-Things Guy: he was the one who could, without a moment's hesitation, spout off the Slytherin password ('now') and the brand name of Jim Potter's imported broomstick (which is a funnier story than most of what appeared here). I'm sorry Hermione dumped you for Ron, Rich--but you're too good for her, anyway. _

That's all, except that I still want Snape's dragon lighter.

EPILOGUE

The sky above was the colour of pewter. The fountain in the courtyard had been drained weeks ago, and only a few dead autumn leaves lay frozen into the shallow ice. Hedwig's shadow fell on the snow before them as Harry, Ron, and Hermione crossed the courtyard bundled in their winter cloaks and scarves. The only thing that had really changed from one year to the next was that Ron's arm was now behind Hermione's neck, under the warmth of her hair, and that the two of them walked in perfect step. It was no more than Harry had expected, sooner or later, but it made him sad to see it.

Looking at the two of them made him wonder. So far the subject had been out of bounds, and they were all three of them careful to talk around that night in the woods, but two weeks had passed. It was time for it, and now was no better place.

"Out of curiosity, Hermione. What song did you hear, before you plugged you ears?"

At once he wished he hadn't asked. Hermione's eyes welled up, but did not spill over, and her voice remained even. Instead of seeming upset, she was grateful. "I had a girl friend, back in the town where I grew up. Her name was Janie. I never heard her sing, but she had an old book of Hans Christian Anderson and we both used to take turns reading it out to each other." She wiped her eyes and nose, then smiled at Harry. "That's what I heard. Janie, reading from 'The Snow Queen'."

"What happened to her?" asked Ron.

"Oh, she died. Ages ago. In a car accident." Hermione wiped her eyes again and turned to Ron with her usual intense interest. "You?"

Ron's voice went rough with embarrassment. "Nah, s'nothing. You don't want to know."

"Come on, Ron," said Hermione, "I told you mine."

Ron suddenly displayed a keen interest in the pattern of the cobblestones. He stuffed both fists in his pockets and mumbled, "You, Hermione. I heard you. Now don't ask me anything more, okay?"

Hermione turned rose-pink. She paused for a moment, then took hold of Ron's chin and gave him a fast hard smooch on the lips. "That's for not saying you heard Britney Spears."

Hedwig's circling shadow fell on the courtyard. Harry extended his arm. After three more perfect circles she landed and settled there, and he fed her a piece of liver he had saved her from dinner. From the high tower the final bell of the year rang on, softer than snow. Less than ten hours remained before the calendar page turned. The old year lingered as they walked. 

The question on Harry's mind--on all their minds, but unasked--was what song Snape might have heard the banshee singing, what could have possibly lured him to her. But this question, like the matter of what song the sirens sang, or what name Achilles took among the women, though puzzling, was not beyond all conjecture.

* * *

In the morning, a huge mottled-grey owl with impassive eyes settled on the table before Harry. He dropped a flat package on the table, near the waffles, and seemed to bow before he took wing with the rest of the owls and left through the open windows of Great Hall.

Ron crowded over. "Who's it from, then?" Harry turned the package over, showing Ron the purple ink on the attached envelope. "Snuffles?"

Hermione appeared on the other shoulder. "Another book from your godfather, Harry?"

"Looks like. Could you both please get off my shoulders? I feel like a pirate with a couple of parrots."

Both of them sat to either side at a respectful distance. "Open it up, then," Ron demanded.

The note read only _Looking for this? S. _ Inside was a battered copy of _Hogwarts Review: 1972_, and Harry had to fight himself from flinging it all the way to the Slytherin table.

"It's the year book for the year your dad graduated," said Hermione. "Isn't it, Harry?"

Nodding again, more slowly this time, he opened it up. On a page toward the centre, he found what Sirius had probably intended for him to find. A picture of the Gryffindor house Quidditch team, captained by Ptolemy Andrew Wood; Keepers, Aidan Desmond and Michael Christopher Hooch; Seeker, James Odysseus Potter. 

* * *

Hagrid walked before them, bearing Hermione's ugly peeling trunk down the front stairs, while Harry, Ron, and Hermione, each carrying their smaller bags, trailed behind him. Dozens of students crowded the foyer, lugging suitcases and satchels out the front doors, hugging schoolmates and saying goodbyes.

"We survived it again," said Hermione.

"Seems so," said Ron. "If we can make it one more year we might be doing something right. What are you doing over the summer?"

"Well, my parents might be attending a seminar on forensic dentistry in Miami. If they do, I'll get to go with them. To America. I'll send you a postcard if you like."

"If you want, but overseas travel'll be a real strain on your owl." Behind Ron's back Hermione caught Harry's attention, then shook her head and rolled her eyes. After all their explanations, Ron still did not grasp the concept of Muggle mail. 

Harry shrugged back at Hermione, then turned his attention to Hagrid. "What about you, Professor? Any plans?"

"Nah, nothing yeh'd be much int'rested in. Got a man out Edinburgh way as got a crop of crickets he's been crossbreedin' fer volume. Says he's figgered out a way to make a ten stone, 150-decibel cricket. Shatters glass when he chirps. Could be worth a look."

Hermione mouthed at Harry: _one hundred fifty decibels? _

They reached the bottom of the stairs and Hagrid set down the trunk, which lifted and hung two inches above the floor. Hagrid pushed it along as if it were on wheels.

"And you, Harry?" Ron set his own bags on top of the floating trunk. "What's your plan for the holidays?"

"Same as always. Lay low, keep quiet, stay out of the house as much as possible."

"I wish you didn't have to go back. Think your aunt and uncle would mind if I abducted you for a bit around the first of July? Percy'll be gone on his tour, and Ginny's going to stay at Mildred Hubble's house for a month. It'll just be you, me, and the twins."

"Sounds great. The Dursleys won't object to anything that makes me disappear for weeks on end."

"You, Ron, and those two?" Hermione groaned. "I don't want to know what you'll be up to."

"We'll send you letters," Harry assured her. "All the gory details."

"Spare me, gentlemen."

Dumbledore and a number of the other professors had gathered in the main hall. Lined against the great windows, they stood with pride or perhaps relief at the sight of all their pupils safely banished for another three months. Madame Hooch flagged Harry down, her brilliant orange-yellow eyes gleaming even with the light at her back. "Don't forget, Potter. Next year's your last chance to win the Cup, so I want you in top form in September. No slacking off during the holidays!"

"I won't, Madame Hooch," he called out, waving back to her. Hermione had broken off for a moment to chat excitedly with--or rather, shout excitedly at--Professor Luddivon, and Ron had just met up with Fred and George. George produced a double handful of something from his pocket, and the three of them leaned around it. In a moment there was a loud bang and a small explosion of horrible yellow, stinking debris. Everyone nearby started sneezing, and the rest of the small crowd scattered. Harry reminded himself to find the twins on the train and complain about the quality of their Surreptitious Glowing Wands.

He marvelled that time, which had seemed so endless before Hogwarts, now seemed so fleeting. Days flew by in a flash, blurring, and every fresh year that appeared never-ending at its commencement came to an end almost before the mind could find a home for memory. It was, he decided, what he disliked most about animated wizard photographs: with a proper photo, one could look at a single suspended moment, unchanging. With wizards, the memory shifted again and again; one could never put a finger on it.

Six years down, one year left.

A faint swishing sound, as of a fold of fabric brushing the floor, approached Harry from behind. He did not need to turn to know who was coming, and when she touched his arm he smelled cinnamon and smoke. Professor Evensong, in her rich purple gown, stood beside him, holding her cloak closed at the throat with one slim hand as if she were cold.

"Hullo, Professor."

She gave a bright, tinkling laugh. With one finger against her lips she drew him into an alcove, away from the noise of the main foyer. "You can call me Yvaine, if you like. I'm only a professor for another hour and a half. Bride's Academy needs a music professor, so I'll be travelling back to Brandubh later tonight." She drew her finger along Harry's cheek and lowered her voice to a soft, anxious murmur. "My offer still stands, Harry. I meant what I said. Dark attracts dark, no matter how strong you think you are."

"I'm sorry. If it's part of me, then it's part of me. If it's a problem, I'll deal with it when the time comes. But thank you."

Her mouth hardened to a thin line. Behind her pupils flashed a bright, burning red, fast as lightning, vanishing before he was sure he'd seen it. "Did you learn nothing from my class, Potter? You never thank the Faerie folk; it's an insult." Her face softened, though one arched brow remained crooked, letting him know she was serious. "I'll forgive you this once. Just remember in the future. Time may come when you'll have to deal with the Faerie again."

Bending slightly, Evensong put her finger between the bars of Hedwig's cage, crooking one in a gentle, beckoning way. Hedwig was antisocial on a good day, but much worse when she was being jarred from side to side of her cage, and Harry was about to warn Evensong when the white owl opened a golden eye, made her low-pitched contented _krrlkl, _and extended her neck so that Evensong could reach the itchy spot behind her eye ridge. Hedwig purred and snuggled back to sleep. 

"So you won't be coming back to Hogwarts." As reassuring as the thought of being rid of her was, he couldn't help but feel a bit disappointed: another teacher he'd had a hand in driving off.

"Bite your tongue! Of course I'll be back. Some aspects of Hogwarts I've found . . . most compelling." Her eyes roved through the throng of mingled students and teachers, pausing on each face, then fixing on one. A slow, provocative smile spread across her face. She stepped backwards with a small, not quite formal bow.

In her ghostly way she seemed to evaporate as she trailed up the side stairs. Harry watched her go, faintly bedazzled, trying to pinpoint the exact moment when she disappeared entirely and unable to do so--the purple velvet melting into the dim stairwell, shimmering, then altogether gone. He almost could have imagined her, if not for the hint of cinnamon she left in her wake. 

"Still here, Potter?"

From his stance it looked as if Snape had been there quite a while, one shoulder propped against the wall, a faint, disapproving scowl on his face. 

"Professor Snape."

"I thought you'd be the first out the door today, Mister Potter. The train will leave without you."

"I've got a few more minutes before we head across, sir." 

Harry shifted his weight, jostling the sleeping Hedwig. She squawked, shuffled her talons more firmly on her stand, and burrowed her head deep between her shoulders again. Hagrid had already steered Hermione's trunk out the door. Ron and his brothers had gone, and there was no sign of Hermione; in fact the hallway was empty save for a few slow-moving stragglers. He and Snape were alone, separated from the other professors and few remaining students by a short, outcropping wall.

"So. I take it you didn't tell her off entirely," said Harry.

He didn't expect an answer. Snape lowered his lids, looked down his hooked nose at Harry. A quick look around seemed to reassure Snape that their absence was not noted. He advanced with no hurry, tall and lean in his black robes, and Harry was overwhelmed with the sudden desire to call for Hagrid.

"No," he said. "But I've told her I don't want to see her again for some time." 

"Women." Harry sighed, then grinned. "You have a real death-wish, sir."

Snape _hrumph_ed. It was almost a laugh--not quite enough of one to put Harry entirely at his ease, but near enough.

"So, you're not retiring from Hogwarts."

"Sorry to disappoint you, but no, I am not."

"I'm . . . I'm not entirely disappointed, sir."

"And you haven't been expelled either."

"No, sir."

"Good." He was quiet a moment, arms folded, as if debating with himself to say more.

Harry, too, wanted to speak, but he couldn't get his thoughts in order. What on Earth did one say to someone like Snape at a time like this? The words that kept coming to him were _you're a hard man to know_--something that Snape undoubtedly already recognised and would not be pleased about hearing. Not from Harry Potter, anyway. 

"I agree with you on one matter, Potter, and one matter alone," Snape said at last. "Whatever darkness you have, keep it. Creatures like Yvaine only know one sort of darkness--black or white, no grey shades for them. We as humans know better. A lot of strength comes from that part of myself, and I won't have her or anyone else meddling with it." He made the same not-quite-a-laugh sound. "Like some people, I prefer my darkness just where it is." 

There was a particularly loud scream and a bang from the main foyer, followed by a long groan. Harry and Snape turned as one to see the disturbance. Agnes Longbottom had gone tail over teakettle down the last three steps, suitcases spilling and bursting open. One of them obviously had a Packing Spell on it; a small volcanic eruption of underthings spewed high into the air, scattering all over the front carpet. A number of her fellow Ravenclaws rushed to help her to her feet, while the rest valiantly rushed to spare the world the sight of a Longbottom's unmentionables. 

Harry turned back to hear the rest, but Snape had gone meditative, lost in thoughts beyond Harry's reach. 

Seeing no one approaching, Harry put down his bag and the cage containing Hedwig. "I just want to tell you, sir. When I come back, it will be my last year. My last real chance here at Hogwarts."

"You might see it that way."

"I was wondering. When I get back in the fall, couldn't we start over as deadly enemies again? You're really creepy as a nice guy."

The corner of Snape's mouth twitched upward. This time there was no mistaking the humour in it. "If you insist, Mister Potter."

He held out his hand. After a moment's indecision, Harry shook it.

Uncertain as to what came next, Harry stepped back, hoisted his shabby bag under his right elbow and with his left hand took up Hedwig's cage. After a long last look at Snape, he turned and joined his fellow students as they left Hogwarts. Snape's laughter followed him all the way down the entrance hall as he stepped out the door and back into the Muggle world.

* * *

__

This small story is hereby dedicated to **John Edward Hancock, II.**_, born 20 November 2001, who graciously chose not to be born in a theatre lobby in order to allow his mother to see the Harry Potter movie, and whose father's efforts in the magical world have merited that a statue be erected in his honour in the halls of Hogwarts._


End file.
